Lone Star History Nugget

After an exciting weekend in Texas, and seeing large single stars on many a home, I decided that the origins of Texas’ “lone star” would make for a good history meme. I also thought it would be nice and simple, since time has once again gotten away from me, and this will barely make the cutoff for this week. Alas, it doesn’t appear to be so easily looked up. However, this website gives a number of possibilities for the origin of the “Lone Star” state, claiming that a single star was used during the Long Expedition of 1819, an attempt to “to free Texas from ‘the yoke of Spanish authority,’” [1] and at Austin’s Colony, the first American settlement in Texas. Some think that the lone star was chosen from a desire to join the United States; others think it came from from them being the lone Mexican state trying to exercise their rights from the 1824 constitution. Whatever its origins, it appears to have been flown on a flag on a number of important battles in the 1820s and 1830s.

The Texas Secretary of State doesn’t shed a whole lot of light on the origins of the star, but does say this, giving us a date for its first “official” use:

Since revolutionary times, Texas has chosen the Lone Star as its symbol. Despite the fact that Texans were at war with the federal government sitting in Mexico City, the Texas Provisional Government took the time to adopt an emblem of “a single star of five points, either of gold or silver” as the “peculiar emblem” of the Republic on March 12, 1836, only ten days after declaring independence! Nine months later this “peculiar emblem” provided the bases for the first Texas seal, which in two years would finally take on the form that we recognize today. This simple and graceful design now appears on official documents, identifies state aircraft, and adorns both the original and new portions of our capitol building.

Sadly, I’m still rather unsatisfied with this. Don’t suppose anyone has better information than I about the origins of the “lone star” symbol?

(As an aside, this website gives a detailed account of the history of the Texas flag, but they all start out with the star as a given.)

1. Weber, David J. (1992), The Spanish Frontier in North America, Yale Western Americana Series, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300051980