Captain Joseph A. Tivy

Tivy was born in Toronto in 1818 and raised in Niagara County, New York. In Texas he homesteaded near present Burleson County and rode with the Rangers from 1839 to 1845 under George B. Erath, Jack Hays and Robert A. Gillespie, then worked as a deputy surveyor for Bexar County, buying land along the Guadalupe. In California he was elected surveyor of Tulare County and sat in the Fifth California Legislature in 1853. In the Civil War he first commanded the Panna Maria Grays, a company of mostly Silesian immigrants. He was buried with a Masonic funeral in 1892.

What the plaque says

Captain Joseph A. Tivy In 1837 Joseph A. Tivy (1818-92) and his two sisters came to Texas from Canada. After serving as a Texas Ranger, Tivy joined his sisters in the California Gold Rush of 1849. There they operated a hotel and he later served in the State Legislature. After returning to Texas in the late 1850s, Tivy fought in the Civil War, attaining the rank of captain. A surveyor, rancher, and Texas Legislator (1873), he served as the first Kerrville mayor in 1889. During his term of office he gave land for the city schools. He and his wife Ella (d. 1888) and his sister Susan (d. 1901) are buried on nearby Tivy Mountain. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Schreiner Mansion — 1.4 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.
• Treue der Union Monument — 14 mi
  An 1866 German-language monument in Comfort over the graves of Hill Country Unionists killed at the Nueces in 1862, its flag of thirty-six stars kept at half-staff.
• Old Tunnel State Park — 18 mi
  A railroad tunnel abandoned in 1942 that now shelters up to three million Mexican free-tailed bats, who fly out each evening from May through October.
• Fort Martin Scott — 21 mi
  An army post of 1848 on Barons Creek beside the German town, where soldiers kept the peace of a Comanche trade and paid the merchants in hard cash.

More markers nearby

• The Original Building of Tivy School — 1.0 mi
• First Baptist Church of Kerrville — 1.0 mi
• Zion Lutheran Church — 1.1 mi
• Saint Peter's Episcopal Church — 1.2 mi