A House of the William Becknell Family

Pat B. Clark's 1937 county history tells the Crockett visit with local detail. Clark says Crockett and a few men crossed the prairie southwest without roads to find Captain Becknall's home, passing about a mile north of Clarksville near James Latimer's field. A man Clark names as Britian told Mrs. Isabella H. Clark of the meeting, and she and Jane Latimer, later Mrs. D. K. Jamison, followed to Becknall's residence. Crockett had been waiting there a few days for recruits to escort him to Houston's army or to Travis at San Antonio.

What the plaque says

A House of the William Becknell Family William Becknell (1788-1856) of Missouri is renowned for opening the Santa Fe Trail from the United States into Spain's New World Empire in 1821. He and his wife Mary settled in 1835 near here, on Becknell's Prairie, with a daughter and two sons. On the way to the Alamo, David Crockett visited them. Becknell himself fought in 1836 in the Texas War for Independence. After milled lumber became available, he or his family built the earliest portion of this house. It was later enlarged and relocated. Restored by Ella Ruth and Harold Wallace in 1968. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lennox Woods Preserve — 9.7 mi
  A Nature Conservancy preserve of mature East Texas forest north of Clarksville, kept by the Lennox family for four generations, with a 1.5-mile loop under post oaks more than 300 years old.
• Eiffel Tower — 24 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 25 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 25 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• William Becknell — 3.3 mi
• William Becknell — 3.3 mi
• Clarksville Cemetery — 3.5 mi
• The Rev. William Stevenson — 3.8 mi