By Tracy Gupton
Our neighboring town of Brazoria’s museum has its popular annual Santa Anna Ball. In 2025, some 189 years removed from the historic event, the Columbia Historical Museum’s Board of Directors is making plans to initiate a similar celebration with hopes for success on a level that will validate the desire to make the first Runaway Scrape Ball an annual event as well.
Tickets to the April 5th Runaway Scrape Ball at West Columbia’s Heritage Hall, 508 East Bernard Street, are currently being sold at the museum, 247 East Brazos Avenue, Flowers by Mary Lee, 301 East Brazos Avenue, Madeline’s Boutique, 229 East Brazos Avenue, and Klassy Kids Lighthouse Daycare, 401 West Brazos Avenue, all in West Columbia. Tickets will also be sold at the door. Catfish and seafood gumbo will be on the menu with music for dancing provided by DarKer Side DJ’s.
The museum board is hoping for a good turnout and encourages local residents and business leaders to join in the fun at the first Runaway Scrape Ball on Saturday, April 5, 2025. Doors will open at 6 p.m. for a social hour that will be followed by dinner provided by On the River restaurant of Freeport at 7 p.m., a live auction scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m. and dancing beginning around 8:30 p.m. Wine and beer will be available. A silent auction is also planned. All profits from the event will benefit the Columbia Historical Museum.
The Runaway Scrape was the term early Texas settlers gave to the mass escape from Mexican troops in 1836 when news of the fall of the Alamo in San Antonio and the mass executions of Texan soldiers at Goliad spread across East and Southeast Texas towns and villages.
“In wagons, on horseback, and on foot, some leading animals packed with belongings, the citizens of Gonzales moved eastward, aided by the few able-bodied men left in town,” author James Donovan wrote in his 2012 book, “The Blood of Heroes,” about the 13-day struggle for the Alamo and the sacrifice that forged a nation. Donovan goes on to write that Byrd Lockhart, who is buried at historic Columbia Cemetery in West Columbia, “led his large family and others along the road he had cleared almost a decade ago.”
“Another ten widows walked through the streets of Gonzales with their children, as had the other evacuating families, leaving all they owned except for what they could carry,” Donovan wrote. “Under a moonless sky, they trudged along the San Felipe road for hours, through scattered forests of oak and mesquite and long, open prairies of sandy loam, until they could barely lift their legs.”
Donovan goes on to write in “The Blood of Heroes” that word quickly spread of the fall of the Alamo “and the rapid advance of the Mexican army, and hundreds of families packed up and set out on the roads east, toward the imagined safety of the Sabine River and the United States border. The Runaway Scrape, as the exodus would come to be known, had begun.”
Former West Columbia school teacher James “Deacon” Creighton wrote of how the Runaway Scrape effected residents of this area in his 1975 book, “A Narrative History of Brazoria County.” Creighton wrote, “As the news spread of the fall of the Alamo, a tidal wave of stark terror and unreasoning fear swept through the country. When word came that (Sam) Houston’s army was retreating toward the San Jacinto, residents in the settlements between the Colorado and the Brazos rivers realized that they were no longer protected. Women, children, pack mules, servants — a throng which stretched as far as the eye could see — streamed eastward from the settlements on the Colorado and the Brazos. Part of this group wound up at Galveston, in temporary shelters of calico and sheeting. Part, including the James F. Perrys, gathered on the banks of the San Jacinto, where a miserable pool of five thousand people waited to be ferried across. There Mr. Perry left his family and started for Galveston to join the command of Colonel Morgan. This exodus of families toward the Louisiana line or to Galveston Island was subsequently to be referred to as the Runaway Scrape.”
Writing about how residents of Columbia, the historic town where Creighton would teach school and coach sports nearly a century later in the 1920s and 1930s, dealt with the situation as it was occurring, “The Deacon” wrote: “At the town of Columbia the same process of evacuation was taking place. Nearly all of the residents, including the Josiah H. Bell family, went down the Brazos by steamboat to Galveston. However, Catherine Carson, a member of Austin’s Old Three Hundred and widowed soon after arriving in Texas, remained behind with her daughter, Rachel. At the time of the Runaway Scrape, both of her sons were with the Texas Army. Her concern for them made her reluctant to leave with the other colonists. Finally, she realized that she and Rachel would have to seek safety. Together they went to the Mound (Damon’s Mound), where they joined the Damon family and fled on to Richmond, Texas. Here they expected protection from a company of Texas soldiers stationed at Fort Bend to protect families crossing the Brazos.
“The plan did not work out. The Mexicans forced a crossing of the Brazos and began firing at the refugees. Catherine Carson helped to load the wagons as the bullets were flying overhead. From the vicinity of Richmond the refugees in this group continued their flight until they reached what is now Montgomery County, about twelve miles from the Trinity River. On April 21, they heard the cannon firing at San Jacinto and thought it was thunder.”
Ammon Underwood, who is also buried at historic Columbia Cemetery in West Columbia, is referred to in Creighton’s history of Brazoria County as being the first from East Columbia and West Columbia to learn about the Texans’ victory over Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s Army at San Jacinto. “Underwood lent one of his horses to C.R. Patton, and in company with R.M. Forbes hurried back to Marion (East Columbia),” Creighton wrote. “We arrived at Columbia Landing (Marion) after having traveled through a depopulated country for 150 miles in a half-starved manner,” said Ammon Underwood. “On the second day of May I was the first person except one belonging to the landing who got back. On May 11th the steamer Yellowstone arrived with a large number of women and children” to East Columbia on the Brazos River, then referred to as Bell’s Landing or Marion.
In closing his chapter of “A Narrative History of Brazoria County” on the Runaway Scrape, James Creighton wrote: “At San Jacinto, a moon came up to cover the dead, both friend and foe. To the Texans it was a moon of hope, and in the days that followed, the colonists returned to their homes to pick up and clear away the debris which the Texas Revolutionary hurricane had left.”
In his 2004 book, “Lone Star Nation,” author H.W. Brands wrote about the Runaway Scrape, “By the end of March 1836 Santa Anna had made a promising start on his campaign of expulsion. Each Mexican victory and each advance by Santa Anna’s army launched a new wave of refugees fleeing his wrath. The scattered nature of the settlements contributed to the fright and confusion. Rumor traveled on the wind and often got distorted in the transmission. Listeners imagined the worst and, in the absence of calming evidence, acted on their imagination. Because the colonists lived far apart, each family felt peculiarly exposed. in many cases the men had gone off to fight.”
“Panic seized the entire populace,” Brands wrote. Quoting an eyewitness to the 1836 horror of war for Texas’s independence from Mexico, Creed Taylor, Brands writes that “Things got worse. News arrived of the disaster at the Alamo; this was followed by wild rumors of massacres of men, women, and children along the Guadalupe. Panic seized the entire populace.”
Brands quoted Creed Taylor as having said, “The first law of nature, self-preservation, was uppermost in the minds of the settlers. And thus the great exodus began.”
And representatives of the Columbia Historical Museum are hoping area residents will attend the museum’s first Runaway Scrape Ball at Heritage Hall in West Columbia on Saturday, April 5, 2025. Tickets or tables can also be purchased online by scanning the QR code in the bottom right corner of the flyer below with your cell phone camera.
For more information contact the museum at (979) 345-6125. To follow activities and programs at the museum, seek out the website online at www.columbiahistoricalmuseum.org.
