Daniel and Precilla Gilleland

The plaque follows the Gillelands from Arkansas to Milam County. After 1825 the family went back to Arkansas to try to recover land taken from them under that year's treaty with the Choctaw Nation, and returned to Texas in July 1830. The Handbook of Texas records what Daniel held on the 1840 census: six horses, 150 cattle, 600 acres and several enslaved people. He branded his cattle DG and surveyed land for a share of it. In February 1838 Martin Ruter preached his first Fayette County sermon at the Gilleland house at Moore's Fort.

What the plaque says

Daniel and Precilla Gilleland Among the first Anglo American settlers to come to Texas with colonizer Stephen F. Austin, Daniel (b. 1795) and Precilla Boatwright (b. 1803) Gilleland were members of Austin's Old Three Hundred colony. The couple and their infant daughter, along with relatives in the Kuykendall and Boatwright families, left their homes in Arkansas Territory and arrived in Texas in December 1821. Making his living as a farmer, Daniel Gilleland received land grants in present Colorado and Austin counties. During the 1830s and 1840s the family moved frequently, farming in Wharton, Fayette, Washington, Harrison, and Montgomery counties. By 1847 they had settled in present Milam County. Daniel Gilleland was instrumental in the growth of the Methodist church in Texas, assisting several congregations. He and Precilla were the parents of thirteen children, three of whom died in childhood. Six Gilleland sons served in the Confederate army. The family cemetery (2.8 miles SW) was established in 1848 and serves as the final resting place of Daniel and Precilla Gilleland, both of whom died in 1873 after more than 50 years spent as pioneers in Texas. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Milam County Courthouse and Jail — 9.3 mi
  Cameron's 1892 Renaissance Revival courthouse and the 1895 St. Louis-built jail beside it, now the county museum, are listed together on the National Register.
• Calvert — 29 mi
  A railroad cotton town of 1868 on State Highway 6 that claimed the largest cotton gin in the world and elected Black men to county and state office during Reconstruction.
• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 30 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.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Mission San Ildefonso — 3.7 mi
• Bushdale Community — 4.2 mi
• Site of Mission San Francisco Xavier de Los Dolores — 4.3 mi
• William Persky — 4.3 mi