Alleyton, C.S.A.

The plaque follows the bales south; who controlled them was a fight of its own. On December 1, 1863, the Texas Cotton Bureau opened in Houston under Lt. Col. William J. Hutchins to obtain cotton, ship it abroad and bring back arms and supplies. Governor Pendleton Murrah answered with a state plan: planters hauled cotton to Mexico in state wagons, kept half the profit and took the rest in state bonds. Kirby Smith objected that the money paid Texas debts, three impressment officers were lynched in Lavaca County that May, and Murrah dropped the plan in July 1864.

What the plaque says

Alleyton, C.S.A. Born as War clouds gathered. Alleyton was a key point on the supply line of the Confederate States of American during the Civil War. It was both beginning and end of the cotton road leading to the Confederacy's back door on the Rio Grande River. By 1860 the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad extended from Harrisburg, near Houston. To Alleyton. As a railhead Alleyton became the site of an important cotton station and Quartermaster Depot during the War. Cotton came here from north and east Texas. From Louisiana, and from Arkansas on the Rails of the B.B.B. & C. and via wagon roads. From Alleyton the South's most precious trading commodity was carried to a point on the Colorado River across from Columbus. A point on the Colorado River across from Columbus. It was then ferried across for the start of a long, tortuous journey to the Rio Grande. The bales of cotton were hauled on big-bedded wagons and high-wheeled Mexican carts, pulled by mules, horses or oxen. The Cotton Road led to Goliad, San Patricio, the King Ranch and finally to Brownsville. Shreds of white fluff on bush and cactus marked the trail of the wagon trains. From Brownsville the cotton was taken across the river to Matamoros, Mexico and subsequently placed on board ships bound for Europe. As the only major gap in the Federal naval blockade of the Confederacy, neutral Matamoros was the place of exchange for outgoing cotton and imported munitions, clothing and medicine. When Federal forces took Vicksburg in 1863 the Mississippi River was sealed off and the Confederacy divided. The Texas-Mexico trade routes became the South's major military supply lines in the trans-Mississippi west. Alleyton was a main destination of the wagon trains returning from the Rio Grande. Rifles, swords, shirts, pants, alum, arrowroot and other items needed by soldier and civilian in the harried Confederacy were unloaded here for new destinations. (1963)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — 3.6 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 13 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.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 21 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 23 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• Alleyton — 0.4 mi
• Benjamin Beason's Crossing of the Colorado River — 3.3 mi
• Joseph V. Frnka — 3.4 mi
• Robert Henry Harrison, M.D. — 3.4 mi