Belle Sherman Kendall

The plaque gives Belle Sherman's marriage one line; an 1895 county history fills in the household. She married Judge William Escrage Kendall on June 26, 1867. Born in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1823, he had taught school, graduated from the Wesleyan university at Delaware, Ohio, and reached Galveston as a lawyer on May 1, 1854, settling at Richmond. They lived first in Richmond and had six sons. Their eldest, Sherman, died at nineteen on the eve of graduating in law at Notre Dame. Her brother Sidney A. Sherman was killed at Galveston on January 1, 1863.

What the plaque says

Belle Sherman Kendall The daughter of Texas revolutionary war general Sidney Sherman and Catherine Isabell (Cox), Belle Sherman (1847-1919) was born in Harrisburg and married William E. Kendall in 1867. After making Houston her home in 1878, Belle S. Kendall became a noted civic leader. She was a founding member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the Woman's Club of Houston. Under her leadership, the Woman's Club played a pivotal role in developing the Houston Public Library system. After securing funds from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie for the city's first public library building, Belle was honored at the cornerstone ceremony in 1902. In 1969 a branch library was named in her honor. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.9 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.1 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 2.1 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.1 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Caspar Braun — steps away
• Anson Jones — steps away
• James Robert Cade — steps away
• James S. and Alfred T. Lucas — steps away