Gonzales opens its Come and Take It Celebration on Friday, October 2, the 191st anniversary of the morning Texian militia refused to give up the town’s cannon, and runs it through Sunday, October 4. The Come and Take It Committee’s schedule puts the Battle of Gonzales Reenactment at 2 p.m. Saturday.
Friday is music night. Seguin’s Ace Boone plays at 8:30 p.m., and the night closes with Houston rapper Paul Wall at 10:30. The Friday program also includes Gown to Glory, a new youth contest in fashion and Texas history.
Saturday starts early. The Come and Take It 5K sets off from Independence Park at 7:30 a.m., and paddlers in the canoe race cover 13 miles of the Guadalupe River before finishing at Santa Anna’s Ford, near the U.S. 183 bridge. The parade steps off at 10:30 a.m. with marching bands and riders on horseback, and Mariachi Los Gavilanes plays after it. The reenactment follows at 2 p.m.
Sunday belongs to the cook-off, which opens at 6 a.m., and to the Gonzales Classic Cruisers Car Show, now in its 28th year. At 12:30 p.m. the Daughters of the Republic of Texas hold their annual memorial service honoring empresario Green DeWitt, whose colony Gonzales was.
The fight the town is marking came on the morning of October 2, 1835, when Mexican dragoons sent to collect a cannon lent to the colonists four years earlier met a Texian force that had grown to at least 140 and would not hand it over. The Handbook of Texas calls it “really only a brief skirmish” that “marked a clear break between the American colonists and the Mexican government.” The Partisan’s account of the cannon and the condition that came with it ran this morning.
The flag the Texians reportedly carried that day read “Come and Take It.” Gonzales has kept the words, and every October it keeps the date.
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