Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads.
In the first 45 years of Victoria’s existence, from 1824 to 1869, the townspeople resided under four successive national banners, experienced two wars and one enemy occupation.
In 1869, at the height of occupation by victorious Union forces after the American Civil War, Confederate cavalryman Victor Marion Rose returned from an Ohio prisoner of war camp and convalescence and took over management of the Victoria Advocate.
Rose was a colorful character in the O’Connor lineage (by marriage) who would write the first complete history of Victoria, corresponding throughout the process with many original residents.
His work, first entitled “Some Historical Facts in Regard to the Settlement of Victoria, Texas” is a priceless boon to anyone interested in the town’s history.
Outside the Victoria County Courthouse, at 100 N. Bridge St., a historic marker highlights Rose who, the marker says, “left college to join the Confederate Army in the Civil War” and wrote much of the news sent home to Victoria during the war.
The marker focuses mainly on the service of his writing both during and after the war.
One of Rose’s descendants, a niece, Kate Stoner O’Connor wrote a short biography of Rose for the 1961 edition of his history of Victoria, renamed “Victor Rose’s History of Victoria.” The book is available at the Victoria Regional History Center.
After offering the dates of his birth and death — Oct. 1, 1842, and Feb. 5, 1893 — O’Connor mentioned Rose’s impressive lineage.
“His father, John Washington Rose, was the son of William Pinkney Rose who commanded a company under General Andrew Jackson in the battle of New Orleans,” O’Connor wrote. “William Pickney Rose was the son of John Frederick Rose, a Revolutionary War sire who married Mary Washington, a niece of General George Washington.”
O’Connor went on to mention, twice in the following paragraphs, Rose “could hardly tell one horse from another” and relied on his friends to bring him his horse after parties lest he should ride off on someone else’s mount.
He was, O’Connor wrote, “quite the ladies’ man,” writing love poems to woo his interests.
“Once when he was about 14 years old, a beautiful young widow of about 30 years of age was visiting his mother,” O’Connor wrote. “She was quite a flirt and exercised her charms on the youth. Victor fell violently in love.”
When she left his mother’s company, Rose followed her home, “where his father had to go and forcibly return him home.” It wouldn’t be his last scandal involving a woman.
In 1859, Rose, then 17 years old, shot and killed a man he believed was about to harm his brother, Volney, on a sidewalk in front of the Wheeler Store in Victoria.
The murdered man’s family sought justice and so Rose’s father, a representative of Victoria in the Texas Congress, spirited his son off to Louisiana.
There, Rose attended college until the outbreak of the Civil War brought him home to enlist in the Confederate Army in Victoria.
He fought in many battles before he was taken prisoner and sent to Camp Chase, Ohio, O’Connor wrote.
“Here the brutal and inhuman treatment of the Confederate prisoners caused many deaths,” O’Connor noted. “Rose came very near losing his life from starvation.”
When he was released from the prison camp after the war, he traveled as far as Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he stayed with a family friend to recover his failing health.
He returned to Victoria in December 1865. Yankee occupation troops were stationed at Forest Grove, the Rose plantation home, after the Civil War.
“Now on his return,” wrote O’Connor, “he found the place desolate.”
The family, unable to pay taxes on the land, lost their home. Rose’s father died of tuberculosis in 1867. But Rose and other people tried to carry on under occupation.
“The young people improvised dancing parties in the country, where there would be no disturbing elements in the blue coats,” Rose wrote of the time after his return, “for the girls, bless their constancy and fidelity to a lost cause, could not be induced to dance with a Yankee.”
He married early in 1866, but his young wife died in the 1867 Yellow Fever epidemic in Victoria. The couple had one daughter, Julia.
Some years later, while Rose was working at the Advocate, a woman from South Carolina showed up on his doorstep, uninvited, claiming he had promised to marry her, O’Connor wrote.
He refused her and “insisted that she leave, which she did, but leaving a pretty bad scandal behind her.”
The scandal was such that Rose left Victoria and went to work for a newspaper in Laredo, where he published his history of Victoria and dedicated it to Col. John J. Linn, one of his heroes from among the original Victoria colonists.
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