It all started with a simple question, from a curious daughter to her father: “Daddy, why aren’t these plaques with the famous letter, all over Texas?”
On a February 2023 visit to The Alamo with her family, 13-year-old Sloane McNutt of Corsicana, Texas, first read Lt. Col. William Travis’ famed “Victory or Death” letter, as it’s become known, on a bronze plaque on the lawn in front of The Alamo.
“That’s kicked it off,” said Rusty Busby, Kendall County chair for the Alamo Letter Society project, the local effort to bring to the Kendall County Courthouse a plaque bearing the Feb. 24, 1836 appeal “to the People of Texas and all Americans in the World” to help reinforce Travis’ 157 men inside The Alamo against a pending attack by thousands of Mexican troops under the rule of Gen. Santa Anna.
Of 254 Texas counties, 23 have already erected a monument, sign or other method of displaying the letter, Busby said, with activity underway in 53 others, including Kendall.
