Pat Cleburne - Cleburne, TX
Posted by: 
WalksfarTX
N 32° 20.765 W 097° 23.351
14S E 651584 N 3579937
Although Cleburne never visited the area that later became Cleburne, several Texas residents served under his command during the Civil War. Upon returning home, they successfully lobbied to name the new city after their former commander.
Waymark Code: WMYGEJ
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 06/13/2018
Views: 2
A 6' statue on a 5' base of Major-General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne in his Confederate Uniform. He has a beard and mustache and his hair reaches his collar. He is wearing a cap. In his right hand he holds a pair of binoculars. His left rests on the hilt of his sabre. His uniform top reaches the top of his knees. A sash is tied around his waist. His boots reach the bottom of his knees.
Encyclopedis of Arkansas History
Pat Cleburne was born in Ovens, County Cork, Ireland, on March 16, 1828, at Bride Park Cottage to Joseph Cleburne, a doctor, and Mary Anne Ronayne Cleburne. He was the third child and second son of a Protestant, middle-class family that included children Anne, William, and Joseph. His mother died when Cleburne was eighteen months old, and his father married Isabella Stewart.
In 1843 he enlisted in the Forty-first Regiment of Foot of the British army, expecting to be sent to India. Instead, the regiment was posted to Mullingar for civil duties in Ireland stemming from the crisis of the Great Famine. For three and a half years, Cleburne was posted at barracks around famine-stricken Ireland. He served during the turbulent months of the 1848 Young Ireland Rebellion and received a promotion to corporal on July 1, 1849. He returned home to find the family farm in arrears for six months rent. His stepmother suggested the oldest four children emigrate.
On November 5, 1849, Cleburne, his older sister Anne, and brothers William and Joseph boarded the Bridgetown for America and landed in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Christmas Day. Employment was a priority, and the siblings headed up the Mississippi River looking for work. Patrick found a job as a druggist at Nash and Grant’s Drugstore in Helena after arriving in April 1850. Immediately following his five-year wait for naturalization, he passed the Arkansas bar examination in 1856. He supported law partner Thomas Hindman in his bid for the Senate against Know-Nothing candidate W. D. Rice. Cleburne was wounded when Rice ambushed him and Hindman in a Helena street in 1856.
Cleburne never owned slaves and voiced his opposition to the institution, yet he valued the right and desire of a section of the country to govern itself. Much of his philosophy was based on witnessing the Irish fight for independence. This acceptance endeared him to the Arkansans whom he would command in battle.
Local plantation owners and well-respected citizens formed a militia company called the Yell Rifles, named for Arkansas governor Archibald Yell. They elected Cleburne captain, and the company was thoroughly drilled in the skills he learned in the British army. The Yell Rifles, along with similar groups from around the state, traveled to Little Rock (Pulaski County) hoping to seize the Federal Arsenal in February, 1861. Federal troops abandoned the arsenal without a fight on February 8. Arkansas seceded on May 6 and joined the Confederate States of America. Patrick Ronayne Cleburne became the highest-ranking Irish-born officer in American military history, attaining the rank of major general.
Cleburne died while leading a charge on the Union breastworks on November 30, 1864, in Franklin, Tennessee. He was buried at St. John’s Church cemetery in Columbia, Tennessee. In 1870, his body was re-interred in Helena in the Helena Confederate Cemetery within Maple Hill Cemetery.