Alfred Madison Hightower

Hightower arrived in 1858, when Tarrant County was dividing over slavery. The Handbook of Texas counts 65 enslaved people in the county in 1850 and 850 in 1860. The vote on secession favored leaving by only twenty-seven out of about 800 ballots. Tension in the divided community led to the 1860 lynching of two suspected abolitionists, William H. Crawford and Anthony Bewley, in Fort Worth. A man who opposed secession and then served the Confederacy, as the plaque says Hightower did, was living among neighbors who disagreed about the same choices.

What the plaque says

Alfred Madison Hightower Alfred M. Hightower came to Smithfield from Illinois with his family in 1858 and became a rancher. When the debate over secession arose, Hightower opposed it, but when the Civil War began, he sided with the South. As a mounted rifleman in the Confederate Army, Hightower fought in many battles, including Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge) in Arkansas, one of the biggest battles west of the Mississippi. After the War, he relocated to Kansas during the 1870s, but returned here in 1880 and continued ranching until his death. Nearby Hightower Street is named in his honor. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — 9.6 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 10 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 12 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 13 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Eli Smith — steps away
• Florence School — 2.2 mi
• Dr. Lilburn Howard Colley — 3.3 mi
• William Letchworth Hurst — 3.4 mi