A historical marker dedicated to Dolphin Ward Floyd, the namesake of Floyd County. (Ryan Crowe/FCR)
FLOYDADA – How well do you know your Floyd County history? Did you know the ‘Floyd’ was an actual person, a North Carolina native who fought and died at the Alamo on his birthday?
Dolphin Ward Floyd was a native of Nash County, North Carolina who moved to Texas in the 1820s, settling in Gonzales and marrying Ester Berry House. He was born on March 6, 1804. He was a farmer and had a 2-year-old son and a daughter on the way when he left Gonzales for the fight in San Antonio.
On March 1, 1836, one day before the Texas Declaration of Independence he joined up with the 31 other men who later became known as the “Gonzales Rangers” to help out at The Alamo, whose fight had been raging since February 24.
Floyd died five days after he and the other Gonzales Rangers arrived, on what was his 32nd birthday. All told more than 200 men died defending The Alamo, with many of them becoming household names for generations of Texans.
Floyd, along with a number of Texas revolutionary heroes, was memorialized in 1876 when the state legislature parceled up Bexar and Young counties into the 1,000-square-mile county we know today.
Two memorial markers exist in the county, one at the rest area in Blanco Canyon placed in 1936 as part of the Texas Centennial. The second marker is dedicated to Floyd directly and was placed in 1986 for the Texas Sesquicentennial by Floyd’s decedents and members of the Floyd County Historical Museum.
