A TXK Today series remembering Texarkana-area veterans through America’s wars. A new story every day through Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2026.
In the late summer of 1862, disease swept a Confederate camp at Rondo, east of Texarkana. Eighty-five men lie there in a common grave, unnamed. In the 1930s, a Texarkana women's group and Rep. Effiegene Wingo got them 17 government stones, one for every five.
Evan Thomas Watson was at Yorktown when Cornwallis surrendered in 1781. He died in 1834 on the Red River in what is now northern Bowie County, then claimed by Arkansas Territory. Where he is buried is uncertain, but his descendants say the family's own records point to the Red River homestead, not to the Sulphur River land now under Wright Patman Lake.
