Albert Clinton Horton

Horton's family stayed in Wharton long after him. His descendant Albert Horton Foote Jr. was born here in March 1916, grew up in the town and made it the model for Harrison, Texas, the setting of The Orphans' Home Cycle. The Handbook of Texas says his first play was a one-act called Wharton Dance, and that the 1965 film Baby the Rain Must Fall was shot in Columbia and Wharton. After his parents died in the 1970s, Foote gathered the family papers from Wharton and drew on them for the cycle's nine plays about three families.

What the plaque says

Albert Clinton Horton (1798-1865) Georgia native Albert Clinton Horton came to Texas in 1834 from Alabama, where he had served in the state legislature. He established a plantation along Caney Creek in present Wharton County. In 1835, he returned to Alabama to recruit volunteers for the Texas army, and he served as colonel of a cavalry unit during the Texas revolution. Upon the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1836, Horton was elected to Congress. He was chairman of the commission appointed by President M. B. Lamar, which selected Austin as the site for a permanent capitol for the Republic of Texas in 1839. When Texas became a state in December 1845, Horton was elected its first lt. governor. He served as acting governor for a year while Governor Henderson was leading Texas forces in the Mexican war. When Baylor University was founded in 1845, Horton was a charter trustee. By the 1850s, he had homes in both Wharton and Matagorda. His home near this site, "Sycamore Grove," was razed in 1960. A community leader, he helped found Wharton's First Baptist Church. He and his wife, Elias Holliday, had six children, only two of whom lived to maturity. Horton died in 1865, and is buried in Matagorda Cemetery. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 27 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 28 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 34 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.

More markers nearby

• St. Paul Lutheran Church — 0.8 mi
• First Baptist Church of Wharton — 1.2 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Wharton — 1.2 mi
• Wharton County — 1.2 mi