General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A.

General Braxton Bragg, a North Carolina-born American military leader, served in Texas in the 1840s with General Zachary Taylor's army in the Mexican War. Made a brigadier general of the Confederacy in 1861, he won renown by capturing many guns and prisoners at Shiloh in 1862 and for the Southern victory in the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. He was respected as a strong disciplinarian, a devoted patriot, and a man with a stern sense of duty. Serving as military advisor to President Jefferson Davis from 1863 to 1865, he traveled with Davis after the Confederate surrender on a suggested escape route, but was captured by Federals and paroled in Georgia in May 1865. After serving as Alabama commissioner of public works from 1866 to 1870, he moved to Galveston, where he was chief engineer in charge of construction of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway, chartered May 28, 1873. When the G.C. & S.F. built into this area, a junction point on the line was named for Bragg, and the town of Bragg, which existed from 1901 to 1934 and is now a ghost site, had many facilities serving the Saratoga Oil field.

Kountze, Texas · United States