City of Wharton

Wharton was incorporated in 1902, when most buildings were wood, and a major fire that year destroyed a number of them. The Handbook of Texas says the loss persuaded merchants and the city government to require brick with fire walls inside the city limits and to build a water system with fire hydrants. The same year the New Century Club opened a free library, which the city adopted in 1904. The town already had a stage: its first opera house opened in 1888, years before it had fire protection or a public reading room.

What the plaque says

City of Wharton The town of Wharton was founded as the seat of Wharton County in April 1846. Land for a courthouse, named Monterey Square, was given from the land grant of William Kincheloe, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists who settled in this area in 1822. The townsite was surveyed by Virgel Stewart and William J. E. Heard, and the rich farmland attracted many settlers. The advent of railroads and irrigation brought increased settlement to the town, which remains a center of agricultural, educational, industrial, and medical services for a large area. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 26 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.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 35 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.

More markers nearby

• Wharton County — steps away
• Judge George E. Quinan — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Wharton — 0.4 mi
• St. Paul Lutheran Church — 0.5 mi