12/25/1838: First Communion service for Texas Episcopalians
On this Christmas Day in 1838, Caleb Smith Ives, an Episcopal priest, celebrated the Holy Eucharist in Matagorda, Texas.
This is believed to be the first time it had been celebrated in Texas according to the Episcopal rite. Ives, a native of Vermont, arrived in Texas late in 1838 and established an Episcopal church at Matagorda. He held occasional services in Brazoria and organized St. John's parish at Victoria but continued to hold the pastorate at Christ Church in Matagorda, where he and his wife operated Matagorda Academy, said to be one of the best academies in Texas. Christ Church was the first Episcopal parish in Texas and, at the time, the most southern and western in the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. Ives died in 1849.
12/25/1839: Kit Carson signs Sawtooth Mountain
On this day in 1839, frontiersman Kit Carson allegedly carved his name and the date on a huge boulder on Sawtooth Mountain in the Davis Mountains.
Carson was born in 1809 in Kentucky and grew up in Missouri. He ran away to Santa Fe in 1826 and subsequently embarked on an arduous and wide-ranging career as a fur trapper. As a guide and hunter for John C. Fr?mont in the 1840s, he gained national fame through Fr?mont's published reports. Carson was an Indian agent in Taos, New Mexico, in the 1850s. He served in the Mexican War and in the Civil War, commanding a New Mexico volunteer regiment in the battle of Valverde. His connections to Texas history included helping foil the Snively Expedition in 1843 and leading the attack against a large number of Kiowas and Comanches in the first battle of Adobe Walls in 1864. He died in Colorado in 1868. Engineers of the State Department of Highways and Public Transportation discovered the inscription on Sawtooth Mountain in 1941.
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