Community of Valley Spring

Smathers grew up on a farm near Valley Spring, went to a one-room country school and entered Texas Christian University in 1904. Typing all day as a credit manager in Kansas City, he set out to power the typewriter with electricity, built a working model by the fall of 1912 and received a patent the next year. Northeast Electric of Rochester signed a royalty contract with him in 1923, its Electromatic model reached the market in 1930, and IBM bought the maker in 1933, the start of its office products division. Smathers worked for IBM from 1938 to 1953.

What the plaque says

Community of Valley Spring O. C. J. Phillips, first settler, arrived in 1853. Whistleville combined with Bugscuffle to form Valley Spring, with post office established 1878. This was birthplace of James Field Smathers (1888-1967), inventor of electric typewriter. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Llano County Courthouse Square — 11 mi
  The 1893 Romanesque courthouse on Llano's square, built after a fire at the height of a boom that was meant to make the granite town an iron city.
• Colorado Bend State Park — 23 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Enchanted Rock State Natural Area — 24 mi
  A dome of pink granite north of Fredericksburg that rises some 385 feet above Sandy Creek, creaks as it cools at night, and has drawn people for thousands of years.
• Fort Mason — 26 mi
  A reconstructed officers' quarters on Post Oak Hill above Mason, standing where the army's stone fort was taken apart by the town that grew up below it.

More markers nearby

• Valley Spring Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• Valley Springs Primitive Baptist Church — 3.1 mi
• Salem Cemetery — 4.3 mi
• Chew Cemetery — 8.8 mi