Article taken from The Sealy News Online website at http://www.sealynews.com/articles/2004/12/07/news/news02.txt
By JIM WEBRE, Staff Writer, December 7, 2004
Recovery of artifacts at historic San Felipe is back in business with recent finds including what appears to be a early 19-century cistern and a button that dates back to the Civil War.
"We found this big metal ring and we didn't know what it was. I believe it's a cistern," said archeologist Marianne Marek.
With grants from the Summerlee Foundation, a private donor, Texas Historical Commission, Sealy and Bellville economic development corporations and City of San Felipe, the San Felipe Project hopes to recover as much as possible the remnants of 1825-1836 when Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, William B. Travis and Stephen F. Austin sought to do business but first got sidetracked in a war for Texas' independence.
Earlier this year, Marek and several devoted volunteer workers unearthed tens of thousands of artifacts, from mammoth bones to eating utensils and fine china.
In terms of historical significance, San Felipe circa 1836 is where Gen. Sam Houston began putting together the army that would later descend on Mexican president and Gen. Antonio de Lopez de Santa Ana at San Jacinto and bring an end to the war.
In the recent movie, The Alamo, many of the scenes depict the controversy and demarcation of troops and material out of San Felipe. Indeed, Travis' march to San Antonio de Bexar and the arrival of Bowie with a militia contingent in a failed attempt to bring back artillery pieces had their beginnings in the log buildings along the mud streets of San Felipe on the banks the Brazos River, later the scene of a delaying engagement by about 100 Texas soldiers as a portion of the Mexican army rolled up on the smoldering remains of the colonial capital of Texas that Houston ordered burned to impede the Mexican advance.
The Confederate States of American button found about a foot in the ground, Marek said, is not surprising.
"There were Confederate training camps up and down the Brazos," she said, although the real treasure of the site still lies in the artifact pertaining to the Texas Revolution some 48 years earlier.