Historians host annual conference Oct. 14

The Alton C. Allen Historical Conference will celebrate a milestone anniversary on Saturday, Oct. 14, when members of the Lavaca County Historical Commission fill the Kocian Building on the south side of the courthouse square in Hallettsville for their 20th annual gathering.

This year’s event focuses on “The Civil War Along the Texas Coast,” and is representative of previous events where specific events or eras were selected in advance and that’s where speakers will focus their energies.

The day’s presentations must be linked by one common factor: All must have a historic or cultural significance here in Lavaca County. Beyond, presenters are at liberty to discuss whatsoever they choose on the subject.

Similarly, most conferences feature prominent speakers in the respective fields, and often present fine artifact collections as part of their presentations and exhibits.

The conference takes its name from one of the county’s s prominent local historians who authored several books on the county’s history during his lifetime.

Held annually since 2002 and featuring a new topic each year, past conferences focused on: “Trail Riders from Lavaca County” (2022), “Once We Were a Republic” (2019), “The Czechs in Lavaca County” (2018), “The Germans in Lavaca County” (2017), and “The Civil War in Lavaca County” (2016), to list but a few.

The entry fee typically runs $10 per person, which includes the noodle soup and chicken salad sandwich lunch.

Registration opens at 8 a.m. on the day of, with the first speakers starting promptly at 9:30 a.m. Early registration is urged before Oct. 2, and can be done by calling Dustin Speyrer at (361) 772-2544 or by sending a message to the Lavaca County Historical Commission’s Facebook page.

The Historical Commission, in a longstanding, much appreciated partnership with the Dickson Allen Foundation, proudly host this year’s program, entitled “The Civil War Along the Texas Coast: Rio Grande to the Sabine.”

Four speakers are scheduled for presentations on Oct. 14. They include:

• Roseann Bacha-Garza (9:30-10:30 a.m.), holds an MA from The University of Texas-Pan American and serves as program manager of the Community Historical Archaeology Project and is a lecturer of anthropology at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg.

She will speak on how many enslaved blacks made use of the wild lands prominent in South Texas to establish the Underground Railroad to Mexico, which worked to free several former slaves well be the war ended.

• Andy Hall (10:45-11:45 a.m.) is the current chair of the Galveston Historical Foundation Museum Committee and has, since 1990, volunteered with the office of the state marine archeologist at the Texas Historical Commission, documenting historic shipwrecks uncovered in Texas waters. He will focus on those very blockade runners on the Texas coast.

(Lunch will be 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m.)

• Ed Cotham (1:15-2:15 p.m.) of Houston is the former president of the Civil War Round Table and remains active in the Civil War Preservationist movement. He will examine some of the major Civil War naval battles leading up to that very first Juneteenth celebration in Texas.

• John Stuart Fryer, Lavaca County prosecutor from 2009-2020 and graduate of Hallettsville High, left for College Station to complete his undergraduate work before heading to Austin’s University of Texas Law School, where he also had opportunity to study at the University of Zurich on a Rotary International Fellowship from 1977-1978 before serving as an assistant attorney general under Texas AGs john Hill and Mark White.

He eventually returned to his hometown, where he developed a keen research interest in the Missouri connections found in Lavaca County. Fryer will speak on the Missouri Partisan Rangers, sharing both evidence and lore that made that group particularly famous.

For more information, please contact Lavaca County historian Doug Kubicek at Kubicek1854@ gmail.com.