LIVE Community Chat with Mike Harrington

Event Details

LIVE Community Chat with Mike Harrington

Time: September 8, 2013 from 5pm to 6pm
Location: TheWildGeese.com Main Chatroom
Event Type: live, chat
Organized By: The Wild Geese
Latest Activity: Sep 9, 2013

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Event Description

Sunday, September 8th is the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Sabine Pass. The occasion is being celebrated as "Dick Dowling Days."

Though a relatively small engagement, Sabine Pass represented perhaps the finest single day's work of any Irish unit, North or South, in the American Civil War. At Sabine Pass, on the Texas coast near the Louisiana border, Galway native Lt. Richard W. "Dick" Dowling, a Houston saloon keeper, commanded the Jeff Davis Guards, a company of the 1st Texas Heavy Artillery Regiment made up wholly of other Irish immigrants to antebellum Texas. With an amazing display of artillery expertise, Dowling's tiny band of Texas Irishmen -- fewer than 50 in all -- drove off a virtual Union armada carrying about 5,000 Federal infantymen, bent on invading southeastern Texas and marching overland to Houston. The President of the Confederacy hailed Dowling's triumph as the "Thermopylae of the Confederacy."  The Davis Guards received the only medals for valor ever awarded by the Confederate Congress. (These medals were made of large Mexican silver pesos hung from Irish green ribbons, and the few that have survived are virtually priceless.)

Dowling's company saved Houston the fate of Atlanta, and a large granite nomument in a public park in central Houston honors the memory of Dowling and his Davis Guards.

Mike Harrington will join us in the Main Chat Room here at TheWildGeese.com at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time to discuss the events 150 years ago at Sabine Pass as well as the festivities taking place at the big "Dick Dowling Days."

Comment Wall

Comment by Rose Maurer on September 8, 2013 at 10:50am

Hi to all TWG members, apologies for my inactivity, but I have been laid low by a particularly virulent of sinusitis. I can't guarantee that I will hold out until 11pm South African time, hence my 'might attend'. Slan.

Comment by Gerry Regan on September 9, 2013 at 10:30am

Rose, may it pass quickly.

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