35. Plaques on the Town Hall

John J Waldron was a member of the Old Tuam Society and was responsible for installing many of the monuments and plaques on sites around the town to explain the history of mostly extinct buildings.

A second plaque on the Hall is in memory of Tuam men who fought in all wars while a third plaque remembers Bobby Burke who was a benefactor of the poor. He was descended from the Henry family, Toghermore in the neighbouring parish of Killererin. In the 1950s he gifted Toghermore House to the State. He left Tuam to go to Africa in the late 1950s.

The fourth plaque is to Major Richard W. (Dick) Dowling Confederate Army American Civil War hero who repulsed two attacks on Houston Texas at Sabine Pass by overwhelming Union forces and who after the war started the first oil company in Texas. He died of Yellow Fever at the age of 30 in 1867.[1]

[1] Visit Galway, ‘Memorials of Galway’, (http://visitgalway.ie/attractions/historic-cultural/historic-statues-monuments/), 31 Jan 2018).