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The
Lone Star is the most iconic of Texas emblems. The Lone Star adorns
the state flag, state seal, the U.S. mint's commemorative quarter
for Texas and, for good measure, it's the state gemstone cut. A few
thousand different businesses are named Lone Star this or that. But
who first came up with the idea? Who was the first person to use the
Lone Star as a symbol of Texas?
Historians have generally traced the origin of the Lone Star back
to various battle flags of the Texas Revolution, or maybe back to
1819 and the ill-fated Long Expedition, which carried a Lone Star
flag into a dubious and unsuccessful early attempt to wrest Texas
away from Mexico. Eli Harris, a printer and member of the expedition,
believed he invented the symbol and wrote to President Mirabeau
Lamar to that effect in 1841.
George
Childress, author of the Texas Declaration of Independence, adopted
a resolution at the general convention of the provisional government
in 1836 calling for "a single star of five points, either of gold
or silver" as the "peculiar emblem" of the Republic
of Texas.
By that time, David Burnett had submitted to the First Congress his
idea for the design of a Texas seal: "a single star with the letters
'Republic of Texas,' circular on said seal, which seal shall also
be circular." President Sam
Houston gave his okay and the republic used Burnett's design for
three years. The Lone Star has stuck around, in one form or another,
ever since. |
| Houston
numismatist James Bevill followed the money in his 2009 book Paper
Republic: The Struggle for Money, Credit and Independence in the Republic
of Texas. In researching the republic's earliest currencies he
found reason to believe the origin of the Lone Star-five pointed with
a raised dot in the middle-originated with an obscure San
Antonio minter named Manuel Barrera in 1817 when the central government
in Mexico authorized a series of coins to be minted in San
Antonio for local use. Spanish Governor Manuel Pardo received
authorization from Mexico City to strike small copper coins for San
Antonio de Bexar (then known as San Fernando de Bexar) and selected
Barrera, a local merchant and administrator, to produce 8,000 jolas
in 1817. |
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Jola
is Mexican slang for a coin of small denominations, and these were
worth ½ real which would be about a nickel today. The copper jolas
measured 15 to 20 millimeters in diameter with the minter's initials
and ½ on the obverse, or front, of the coin. On the reverse was the
five-pointed star with a raised dot in the center. These humble little
jolas are also the only known Spanish coins to have been struck in
what is now the United States.
After about twenty months, the Mexican government withdrew Barrera's
authority to mint the coins, probably because minting was a hard thing
to do in 1817 and 8,000 jolas was a lot of jolas. The
job went to Jose Antonio de la Garza, whose initials appear on some
of the surviving 1818 jolas. Both issues still in existence
have all kinds of variances, suggesting to Bevill "a series of small,
almost random mintages intended to supply change for the local economy."
No records confirm how many jolas Barrera actually minted,
but only nine of the crude 1817 coins are known to exist today. A
collector found five of them in 2004 as part of a "junk" collection
in Schulenburg.
The 1817 jolas preceded the Long Expedition by two years and
the Texas revolution by almost two decades. So what did the lone star
flag and emblem represent before it represented Texas as an independent
republic?
Alamo historian and curator Bruce Winders responded to that question
in an email by noting that in vexillogy-the study of flags-stars traditionally
represented kingdoms or sovereigns until the end of the 18th century
when the star became a symbol of republican ideology, and thus a good
fit for the fledgling Texas government. But Winders also noted that
before Texas was the Lone Star State, it shared a flag-and a star-with
the Coahuila province. That flag was green, white and red with two
gold stars in the middle of a white stripe.
"Prior to the Texas revolution, the Texas star flew alongside the
star of Coahuila because Texas lacked a sufficient population for
separate statehood as established by the Constitution of 1824," Winders
said. "Officials designated it the Department of Texas and attached
it to Coahuila for purposes of governance."
Bevill says the lone star on the jolas might have carried the
same symbolism as the flag. "There were Americans in San Antonio de
Bexar who thought of Texas as having a separate identity from Mexico,"
he said. "But it's hard to say where the influence came from. These
were Spanish coins, after all. We don't know if Barrera designed it,
or if his helper or maybe the alcade. But we do when the Lone
Star first appeared, and that was on the jolas that Barrera
minted in 1817." |
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