First Schott! Veteran actress hired to play Sarah DeWitt for Texas Legacy in Lights

The historical impact Sarah Seely DeWitt had on colonial Texas and the Texas Revolution is not lost on the actress who will follow in her footsteps.

“She never could have thought when she decided at that moment … this was her little act of defiance and what a powerful statement it is still today!” said Seguin resident Peggy Schott, who will portray the first lady of the Green DeWitt Colony in the Texas Legacy in Lights project, which begins filming next month near Gonzales.

The 33-minute historical film will be projected — twice nightly, six nights a week — onto the 32-foot by 96-foot outside façade of the Gonzales Memorial Museum using state-of-the-art 3D mapping for an immersive, augmented-reality experience which will transport viewers back to 1835 and the events in and around Gonzales which led the Texians ultimately to independence from Mexico.

Schott, a veteran film and TV actress who has appeared in Angel Studios’ “Vindication,” “Fear the Walking Dead,” and “The Pale Door,” among others, is the first big name attached to the project being developed by John Franklin Rinehart and his Austin Film Crew company and funded through a grant from the Gonzales Economic Development Corporation (GEDC).

She said she was drawn to Texas Legacy in Lights because of its focus on perspectives that might not otherwise receive the attention they so richly deserve.

“I have been acting in film and television in Texas for about 14 years now, and I have an agent who submits me to different projects, but I also look for things on my own,” Schott said. “I just happened to see this pop up on one of the sites that I keep track of, and to me, it just was extra interesting, because I'm a big fan of history in Texas history. I have ancestors who were here before the Texas Revolution, and I've always enjoyed doing historical interpretations.

“The more I found out (about the production), the more interested I became in doing it. In all of my family history research, the thing that I search for the most is the stories of the women, because those are harder to find. You don't hear much about them, so I love the fact that, in this, John is going to be focusing on the women's stories — the women and the children — and the struggles that they went through in order to help get us to the comfortable lives we live today.”

Schott said she loves roles that feature women with a “defiant streak” because “their stories are the ones that we just don’t get to hear very often, so I love to hear stories of these strong women who persevered.”

Sarah Seely DeWitt helped her husband achieve his dream of founding a colony in Texas as an empresario and petitioned the Mexican government to give her a land grant her of one league (4,428 acres) under her maiden name at the confluence of the San Marcos and Guadalupe rivers.

After the death of Green DeWitt, she remained in Gonzales with her children and is credited, along with daughter Eveline, with designing the famed “Come and Take It” flag on a recycled wedding dress. That flag flew proudly when the Old 18 stood up to the Mexican Army and refused to surrender the town’s cannon. Sarah DeWitt would die in 1854 and was buried in what is now the Green DeWitt Cemetery inside the JB Wells Park grounds.

Like Sarah Seely DeWitt herself, Schott is not a native Texan, but fate brought her to a fulfilling life in the Lone Star state. A native of New Orleans, Schott is the daughter of a sixth-generation casket maker, Bob Shirer, whose specialty coffins were featured in the Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt film “Interview with a Vampire.” She is also a descendant of the first non-native inhabitant of New Orleans, Antoine Ritvard dit LaVigne, who was granted land that today is the site of the famed New Orleans Fairgrounds.

Schott had female ancestors — Mary Foreman Bland, Elizabeth Smith Bland Johnson, Kezia Anders Allen, Spicy Matilda McQueen Taylor and Laurena Taylor Lewis Allen — who were in Texas before and during the Texas Revolution, as well as two others, Martha Ann Allen Bland and Marie Stutes Foreman, who were residents of the Republic of Texas.

Married to Kevin Schott, the mother of three and grandmother of five lived in Austin for 32 years until deciding to make their “little getaway” home in Seguin their permanent place of residence.

“When the pandemic started, we were here in Seguin and I literally told him, ‘This could last a couple of weeks. Why don't we hang out here?’” Schott said. “Two and a half years later, we were still here in Seguin and decided, you know, we don't need Austin. We just love the small town feel. The people here are wonderful and I love the history here, so I became really entrenched in Seguin. I'm now part of the Seguin Conservation Society and I work with the (South Texas) Pregnancy Care Center here.”

Schott is no stranger to Gonzales, either, as some episodes of the hit AMC TV series “Fear the Walking Dead” were filmed in the First Shot city. On the show, Schott played Tess, a survivor of the zombie apocalypse who joins up with Lennie James’ Morgan Jones in Season 5.

“We filmed some things in Gonzales and I do believe it was the middle of July and was hot as it could be on an old abandoned bridge, but it was great to be close by because I live in Seguin,” Schott said.

“During the pandemic, my husband and I were looking for excursions and one of the ones we did was to go to Gonzales so he could see some of the places we shot for the TV show. While we were there, we were also able to go to several museums. The prison museum was very interesting and the Memorial Museum, where we got to see the cannon. They also had the driving tour where we could go to different houses and pull up the history of them on our phones.

“Those are the kinds of things I find so interesting and how sad it is that it took a pandemic to get us to come to Gonzales, but I'm hoping that this project is going to be such a big draw that it'll get more people to want to come to Gonzales, to learn about the history and to visit the town since when we were there, we really enjoyed it,” she added.

Schott said she has been contacted already by wardrobe to start working on costuming for next month’s shoot. Some of the costumes being used by those portraying the Texians and Mexican Army are even rumored to be from the epic John Wayne movie “The Alamo” which was filmed in Brackettville.

Texas Legacy in Lights is similar to “San Antonio: The Saga,” a 24-minute projection that is digitally mapped across the surface of the San Fernando Cathedral façade in San Antonio and draws thousands of visitors to the Alamo city every year. Gonzales will become just the fifth U.S. city to host a digital mapping display — using technology typically seen at only at world-class shows like the ones at Disney’s EPCOT.

With a sound show designed by a former media engineer for NASA and using speakers and subwoofers buried in the ground and covered by plants, the experience will make visitors feel like they truly are in the midst of the battle. The entire surface area covered by the installation will be more than 90,000 square feet.

Supporters of the project say it has the potential to attract more than 20,000 people annually and generate up to $1 million annually in direct visitor spending on local businesses; $600,000 in annual hotel revenue from increased overnight stays and $80,000 in additional annual sales tax revenue for the city.

Rinehart said the project is aiming for a soft opening in July with a grand opening celebration to take place on Oct. 2, 2025 — the 190th anniversary of the Battle of Gonzales and the day before the annual Come and Take It Celebration begins.

“I can’t wait to see this. With the technology where it is that John is able to do this, it is going to be fantastic,” Schott said. “But what I'm hoping is that it's going to have the effect on all the viewers that being part of it has already had on me, because I'm standing here, I've pulled out all my family history files that I haven't looked at in years, and I'm doing more research and finding out more.

“And I hope that when people see this, it makes them want to research either their own family or just anybody who has been through the Texas Revolution or anything in history, to learn about our past, because it's so important to know. So I hope this inspires people and I hope it sets a precedent for other communities to do more things like this.”