Battle Cemetery and Community

Nicholas William Battle was born in Georgia in 1820, studied law at William and Mary, and came to Waco in 1850. He served as district attorney and later as district judge. The Handbook of Texas notes one of his rulings, that no freedman could sell himself into slavery under Texas law, which the state Supreme Court upheld in Westbrook v. the State. He moved to Seattle in 1888 to live with his sons and died there in 1905. The Handbook says he is buried in Seattle, far from the Texas community and cemetery that carry his name.

What the plaque says

Battle Cemetery and Community Established about 1880, the Battle community was named for local landowner Nicholas W. Battle (1820-1905). By the 1890s a town had developed, including a school, post office, business, homes, and churches. A cemetery was established on land acquired from Alexnder and Kenneth McLennan. The earliest documented grave dates to 1888. Following the building of the International and Great Northern Railroad line about 1901, the town began to decline. The Battle Cemetery stands as a memorial to the area's pioneers. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 13 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 13 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 14 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 14 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

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