Butler Church Bell

The plaque says the bell is said to have come from a riverboat, and the Trinity did carry steamboats. The Handbook of Texas places one called the Roliance on the river around 1847, bringing supplies to settlers, and says cotton from Butler went to Galveston by steamboat. Before 1874 nearly fifty boats worked the river, and in the 1868 to 1869 season they carried 15,425 bales of cotton downstream. Railroads reaching Dallas in the early 1870s then drained the trade. The Handbook does not mention the S. A. Ruthven or its sinking, so the bell's origin stays a tradition.

What the plaque says

Butler Church Bell Said to have come from riverboat "S. A. Ruthven", which plied Trinity River until it was sunk in 1873 at Parker's Bluff. Butler Church acquired bell and used it for many years. In 1963, after the church was razed, Mrs. Clay Burkhart purchased bell, donated it to county museum in 1964. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 19 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 25 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 25 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.

More markers nearby

• Site of Law Office, General John Gregg — steps away
• Val Verde Battery, C.S.A. — steps away
• Freestone County — steps away
• First Methodist Church Bell — steps away