The Tristan de Luna Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution marked its 75th anniversary with a gift to local history: a historic marker honoring the Spanish conquistador whose 1559 expedition helped open the northern Gulf Coast to European settlement.
The dedication was set for May 11 at 9:30 a.m. at Battleship Park in Mobile, timed to the 200th bicentennial celebration of the State of Alabama. Mary Ruth Andrews of the DAR led the effort.
Who Was Tristan de Luna?
Tristan de Luna y Arellano was dispatched from New Spain — present-day Mexico — in 1559 with an expedition of more than 1,500 soldiers and colonists, along with horses and eleven ships, to establish a settlement on the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico.
Judging Mobile Bay a poor harbor, Luna sailed east to Ochuse, today’s Pensacola Bay, where his colonists established a temporary settlement. He eventually returned to the Mobile Bay area near Bon Secour on the southeastern shore, where he had first landed.
The marker ties Mobile’s colonial-era story to one of the earliest European expeditions on the Gulf Coast, a chapter local historians have worked for years to highlight during Alabama’s bicentennial era.