Corsicana in 1860-1872

Reconstruction in Corsicana was quieter than in many Texas towns, the Handbook of Texas says. Chaffee's troops camped on the square, and a Navarro County history says he broke up a crowd of soldiers about to mob Clinton Winkler. The Handbook adds that Chaffee enlisted former slaves as police, and the county history says freed people voted in October 1866. Violence came in 1869, when soldiers sent to arrest John Wesley Hardin fought him and his cousin Simp Dixon in the Richland bottom, and two soldiers died.

What the plaque says

Corsicana in 1860-1872 A center of patriotism especially committed to the Southern cause. After the Nov. 1860 presidential election, citizens lowered the Stars and Stripes and ran up the Texas flag on the Courthouse. Early in 1861 influential men beat drums on the Square to recruit soldiers for the Confederacy. Some 450 Navarro County men enlisted. These included two officers who made outstanding records, Cols. Roger Q. Mills and Clinton M. Winkler. In the Courthouse, county commissioners appropriated funds for arms and ammunition and for support of soldiers' families. In 1864, civilians -- including old men, women and children -- helped stock a Confederate Quartermaster Depot which was located in a store building on this corner. After the Confederate surrender in 1865, Federal troops under Lt. A. R. Chaffee camped on this corner to enforce peace terms. One civilian resisting the troops was John Wesley Hardin, then only 16, and not yet a celebrated gunman. But he notched his pistol in a fight with soldiers 10 miles south of town. The Texas Democratic Convention met in Corsicana in 1872, after Federal troops withdrew, and made plans whereby military despotism was replaced by civilian control of state government by bona fide Texans. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 0.5 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 21 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.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 30 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Thomas Ingles Smith — steps away
• Jose Antonio Navarro — steps away
• Judge E. J. Simkins House — steps away
• Site of the First Courthouse — steps away