A map of the town tract of Goliad was made in 1857, from data furnished by Dr. Barnard, and is on file in the County clerk's office of Goliad County. It indicates certain spots where Fannin's men were buried by Rusk's Texans. Dr. Barnard is believed to have had first hand information as to the actual site of the burial.  For many years this place remained unmarked and unprotected, until the very location was almost forgotten-almost, but not quite.

One old citizen of Goliad, Mr. George Von Dohlen, who was a prominent merchant there in 1858, remembered the spot had been pointed out to him by some people who lived in La Bahía in 1836, as the location of the trench. He gathered up rocks and piled them on the place pointed out, to keep the cattle and animals from tramping on it, he said.  This pile of rocks interested a group of Boy Scouts and their leader in 1930 when they found a few bone fragments that had been dug up there by rodents or armadillos, and reported their find to their families.

But two years before, in 1928, Judge J. A. White, Mr. W. E. Fowler, and Mayor Joseph Wearden, believing the evidence of the rock pile and bones, bought for the County of Goliad two acres of land from Manuel Cabrera, a descendant of early La Bahía natives. Again, on New Years Day, a party of Goliad citizens visited the place, and, on investigating, found fragments of charred bones and teeth which a dentist, a member of the group, pronounced as undoubtedly human remains. This aroused interest in suitably marking the grave, and when Texas celebrated its centennial of liberty in 1936, the state erected the beautiful pink granite monument there and landscaped the grounds. In the spring, the park surrounding it is massed with a solid sod of beautiful blue bonnets, the state flower.