Coryell County

The 1860 census counted 2,360 free people in Coryell County, and 81 of them held 306 enslaved people, according to the Handbook of Texas. Most residents favored secession, and county voters approved it in 1861 by 293 to 55. The war cost the county dearly: between 1864 and 1866 its tax base fell 63 percent, and about a third of the lost property was enslaved people, counted as property. Some freed people left afterward, though most stayed. In 1869 voters chose Andrew J. Hamilton over Edmund J. Davis for governor, 259 to 0.

What the plaque says

Coryell County Formed from Bell County; created February 4, 1854--Organized March 4, 1854. Named in Honor of James Coryell, born in Tennesse in 1796; a member of the Bowie Expedition to the old San Saba Silver Mines in 1831; a Texas Ranger; killed by Indians near Fort Milam May 27, 1837. County seat Fort Gates 1854; Gatesville since.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mother Neff State Park — 11 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Bosque Museum — 24 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 28 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 29 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.

More markers nearby

• White Mound Baptist Church — 5.1 mi
• Fort Gates — 5.7 mi
• First Baptist Church of Oglesby — 6.1 mi
• Osage Cemetery — 7.0 mi