The church is smaller than you expect. That is what most visitors notice stepping through the gates of the Alamo in downtown San Antonio — how modest the building is, how low the walls, how quiet the courtyard. And yet 200 men chose to die here, on a February morning in 1836, rather than surrender it.
Mission San Antonio de Valero was established in 1724 by Franciscan missionaries as a frontier place of worship, later converted into a military outpost. In February 1836, approximately 200 Texian volunteers — among them William Barret Travis, James Bowie, and Davy Crockett — occupied the old mission as Texas fought for independence from Mexico. General Santa Anna surrounded them with roughly 1,500 soldiers and demanded unconditional surrender. The Texians answered with a cannon shot. The siege lasted thirteen days. Travis wrote letters appealing for reinforcements; thirty-two men from Gonzales were the only ones who came. On March 6, before dawn, Santa Anna launched a coordinated assault on multiple sides. The outer walls fell in less than two hours. Nearly all the defenders were killed. Survivors were executed on Santa Anna’s orders. No quarter was given.
The defenders’ bodies were burned. In the days that followed, Mexican soldiers reported figures they called “diablos” — torches or swords of flame — blocking the doorway of the church. They refused to enter. Santa Anna investigated and found nothing. The church was not demolished. By the 1890s, the San Antonio Express-News was publishing accounts from Alamo officers and staff of ghostly sentries on the roof and shadowy figures moving through the building. The newspaper treated these as news.
Story Source: www.legendsofamerica.com
Address: The Alamo, 300 Alamo Plaza, San Antonio, TX 78205
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