John Purdy Reynolds: Alamo Defender and Physician (1806–1836)
By: Bill Groneman
Revised by: Steven Douglas Lukefahr
Published: May 1, 1995
Updated: October 22, 2025
John Purdy Reynolds, Alamo defender, son of Judge David and Mary (Purdy) Reynolds, was born at Cedar Springs, Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, on March 7, 1806. In 1827 Reynolds graduated from Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. The following year Reynolds and his close companion, William McDowell, left Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, for Mifflin (in present Chester County), Tennessee, a town founded by Reynolds’s uncle. There Reynolds practiced medicine for seven years.
According to Reynolds’s family history, in late 1835, after reading a newspaper announcing Sam Houston’s urgent proclamation calling for volunteers in the name of Texas liberty, Reynolds and McDowell were deeply moved and soon departed to join the Texas Revolution. According to the Reynolds Family Association, Reynolds spent $2,000 on horses, muskets, ammunition, food, and other supplies for the venture for themselves and three other volunteers: Joseph Bayliss, Robert Bowen, J. E. Massie. They joined the Tennessee volunteer company of Capt. Herbert Simms Kimble and boarded a steamboat for Natchitoches, Louisiana. In Nacogdoches, on January 14, 1836, Reynolds was sworn into the Volunteer Auxiliary Corps of the Texas Army and served as the unit’s physician. Briefly joined by David Crockett, Kimble’s unit, which included Micajah Autry, Daniel Cloud, and other Tennessee volunteers, traveled to San Antonio de Béxar.
At the Alamo, Reynolds probably defended the palisade position of the mission fort as one of “Crockett’s Tennessee Boys.” On March 1, 1836, the “Immortal Thirty-two” arrived to aid the besieged Alamo garrison. One member was David Porter Cummings, whose uncle married Reynolds’s first cousin, and whom Reynolds’s had known from his youth in Lewistown, Pennsylvania. Reynolds died in the battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. He may have assisted as a surgeon in the Alamo garrison, although his name did not appear among other surgeons in the March 24, 1836, issue of the Telegraph and Texas Register. In his memory, a marker was erected at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cemetery in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, by Reynolds’s half-sister, Eleanor (Moore) Reynolds in the 1880s. His collection of early medical books was donated to Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
Bibliography:
Albert Curtis, Remember the Alamo Heroes (San Antonio: Clegg, 1961). Daughters of the American Revolution, The Alamo Heroes and Their Revolutionary Ancestors (San Antonio, 1976). Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Muster Rolls of the Texas Revolution (Austin, 1986). Bill Groneman, Alamo Defenders (Austin: Eakin, 1990). Pat Ireland Nixon, The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528–1853 (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Lupe Memorial Fund, 1946). Steven Douglas Lukefahr, “Dr. John Purdy Reynolds,” Alamo Dispatch no. 197 (Spring, 2023).
Categories:
Time Periods:
Places:
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Bill Groneman Revised by Steven Douglas Lukefahr, “Reynolds, John Purdy,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/reynolds-john-purdy.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FRE58
All copyrighted materials included within the Handbook of Texas Online are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 related to Copyright and “Fair Use” for Non-Profit educational institutions, which permits the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), to utilize copyrighted materials to further scholarship, education, and inform the public. The TSHA makes every effort to conform to the principles of fair use and to comply with copyright law.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
- May 1, 1995
- October 22, 2025
This entry belongs to the following special projects:
