
September 11 will go down in history as the day the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised the first flag at their memorial park off Interstate 10 at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
On Sunday, the confederate group mowed the grass at the site and raised the flag of the Army of Trans Mississippi. The commander of the Orange County chapter of the sons said the ceremony was held because the members of the group had gathered for the commemoration of the Battle of Sabine Pass.
The flag at the site is similar but different colors than the common confederate battle flag. The flag on display has a black background with a red cross with white stars. The battle flag has a red background with a blue cross with white stars.
The website civilwar.org says the Army of Trans Mississippi was the last confederate group to surrender to the United States. The Army of Trans Mississippi fought in the last battle of the war, Battle of Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, on May 12-13, 1865. General Kirby Smith surrendered to U.S. forces in Galveston on June 2, 1865 almost two months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans took out a city building permit in January 2013 to build a $50,000 park at the site, which is about a half acre. The original solicitation for the park described it as a “Confederate Flag Memorial” with a rotunda with 13 Grecian columns, plus sidewalks and benches. The park was supposed to have dozens of different flags from the Confederate States of America.
The Orange City Council then passed an ordinance restricting the size of flags that could be displayed in the city. Two car dealerships who already had oversized flags were allowed to keep theirs under a “grandfather clause.”
The concrete rotunda and columns were soon moved to the site, but months passed before they were erected. The concrete was never painted and sidewalks were not installed.
Last year, the Texas Department of Transportation asked the city of Orange to prohibit parking, for safety reasons, along the memorial on the Interstate 10 access road and MLK Jr. Drive, which is a state farm to market road. The city also installed “No Parking” signs along 41st Street; so the triangular-shaped park has no parking along the streets that border it.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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