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Sweetman also found another pair of guns that he thought interesting:
On brass plates attached to the wooden carriages of each of the two guns, iron six-pounders, much more symmetrical in shape and appearance, was the following, the first line in old English.
TWIN SISTERS
THIS GUN WAS USED WITH TERRIBLE EFFECT
AT THE BATTLE OF SAN JACINTO.
PRESENTED TO THE STATE OF TEXAS
BY THE STATE OF LOUISIANA
MARCH 4, 1861
HENRY W. ALLEN
CHARLES C. BRUSLE
WILLIAM G. AUSTIN
COMMITTEE OF PRESENTATION
From the condition of the guns at the time I saw them, it was evident that no person there at the time took very much interest in them, and if the only object was to get rid of them it is more likely they would be thrown into Buffalo Bayou than shipped.
Sweetman then exits stage left while Dr. H. N. Graves enters stage right.
On their way home after the end of the war, Dr. Graves and his buddies step off the train at Harrisburg six miles south of Houston on August 15, 1865. In Graves’s own words:
Arriving at Harrisburg, when alighted from the train we saw a number of ca
He goes on to say:
Before burying the ca
I have a problem with this statement. Number one, what woodwork? An entire gun carriage was built of wood. Number two, a fire would have caused suspicion. Union soldiers were camped within a mile and often walked to Harrisburg for food and drink. Number three, what was left of the carriages to throw in the river if they were burned? And number four, why roll the ca
Graves went on:
It developed that the earth at the spot selected for burial was more compact than anticipated, as a result of which we dug only about two and a half or three feet. Then we buried the little Twins in a single shallow grave, marking the spot as best we could by hacking a number of nearby trees. The earth was tamped down as firmly as could be done with our feet, and dried leaves and brush were heaped over the spot.
This is the only detailed account Graves gave. If only he had said which direction he and his buddies took when they stole the ca
Before leaving, the men all took a solemn oath that none of them would ever reveal the secret of their hiding place until all possibility of their ca
In 1905, forty years later, Dr. Graves, Sol Thomas, and John Barnett returned to Harrisburg and attempted to relocate the site where they buried the guns. They drew maps separately, according to their memories of the landmarks, and compared sketches. The maps all coincided; however, the men were not successful in finding the exact spot, since the terrain had undergone marked changes — a situation I find all too often on NUMA searches.
The three men actually found three of the original marked trees and two of the stones they had placed in the general area. This would indicate that they must have been within a dozen feet of the Twin Sisters.
Another fifteen years passed, and then, in 1920, a reporter with the Houston Chronicle by the name of Mamie Cox persuaded Dr. Graves to come back to Harrisburg for another try at finding the Twin Sisters. In her story, Graves was driven around Harrisburg before stopping in the general location of the guns’ burial. Unfortunately, no record was left as to where the car stopped for the search or to whom the property belonged. Supposedly, Graves found two of the landmarks he left in 1865.
So ends an intriguing tale of a mystery filled with bafflement.
Texans have been drawn to search for their heritage over the decades. Many individuals and groups have probed the landscape around Harrisburg looking for the guns. They’re probably the only tourists who go there. Despite their efforts in analyzing clues and pursuing tantalizing leads that never pan out, they still search. And so does NUMA.
We first beat the bushes in the fall of 1987. Wayne Gronquist, Austin attorney and then president of NUMA, assembled a group of ten or so Texans who owned metal detectors and were fired up for the hunt. The first probe concentrated on the area west of the railroad tracks that run north across Bray’s Bayou into Houston. We spread out in a line and worked inland from Bray’s Bayou.
It was like trying to pick up confetti with a nail on a stick during a windstorm. Over the years, industrial manufacturers had used this location to dump everything from scrap metal to steel fifty-five-gallon drums to old refrigerators. There was so much iron that the metal detectors and magnetometers almost burned up.
I made the only discovery of the day. When sweeping through a field of high grass, I was startled down to my socks when two illegal immigrants leaped up and took off across the field. They must have been either hiding or sleeping when I almost walked on top of them. I shouted after them, “It’s okay, enjoy your day!” But they never turned or looked back before vanishing in the woods.
In 1988, Gronquist met up with another group of Texans looking for the ca
The next day, using the Schonstedt gradiometer, I found an iron rim that came off an old wagon wheel and dug it up along with several old bottles. I felt the rim was too narrow for a ca
The next day, there was a conflict between the two groups. Harper and Wiseman became angry because one of the people who had volunteered to bring his metal detector was a known treasure hunter. Why this bothered them, I’ll never know. If found, there was no way the guns were going anywhere but to the state capital in Austin, and from there to the conservation labs at Texas A&M. They were also disappointed that we had not rented a bigger backhoe, even though we had excavated along the railroad tracks where they requested. Then there was a problem of proprietary rights. I got the idea that they thought the Twin Sisters belonged to them and that we were interlopers cutting into their territory.