The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 66, July 1962 - April, 1963 Page: 591

Texas Collection

Headright Certificate reciting, "This is to certify that Josephus S.
Irvine has appeared before the Board of Land Commissioners of San
Augustine County and proved that he arrived in this Republic in the
year 183o, that he is a single man and entitled to 1/3 of a league."
He was also issued Bounty Certificate No. 2537 on March 3, 1838,
and later Donation Warrant No. 70o6 for 640 acres of land for being
at the battle of San Jacinto.
During the War Between the States Josephus S. Irvine was a captain
in Likens' Battalion, Texas Volunteers, and was at Sabine Pass in
1861; he was commissioned a major in Spaight's Battalion, Texas
Volunteers on June 17, 1862.
Irvine was a Methodist preacher; was Chaplain of the Grand Lodge,
A.F. 8 A.M., in the State of Texas; and was tax assessor of Newton
County, Texas. The first court ever held in Newton County, Texas,
was held in his barn at his home about four miles north of the town
of Newton on the south side of Quicksand Creek and east of the
present highway from Newton to Burkeville.
University of Texas archeologists have begun excavations at
the site of San Lorenzo de la Santa Cruz Mission to learn more
about its Eighteenth Century Spanish and Indian inhabitants.
A University Research Institute grant is supporting work at the
site near Camp Wood in Real County, about forty miles north of
Uvalde.
Workers have already uncovered a deep room of three-foot-thick
adobe brick walls, a partially-burned roof made of timbers,
clay showing grass impressions, and the burial site of a young
Indian woman. Mission San Lorenzo is important because it was
occupied only briefly and artifacts recovered at the site can be
precisely dated, explained W. W. Newcomb, University anthro-
pologist. "Identical or similar material from other historic sites
can at last be related to a known series," Newcomb said. That
fact may be of aid in "unscrambling the dates and affiliations of
some historic Texas sites." Broken crockery, kettles, gun flints,
and other articles already found at Mission San Lorenzo belonged
to the Spaniards who established the mission in 1762 and oper-
ated it for seven years.
The mission was established for the Lipan Apaches, and they
are believed to have been the only Indians ever "in residence"
there. But Indians from the north, Comanches and Wichitas,

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