David Robert Wingate

Wingate's wealth rested on enslaved labor. A Wikipedia biography says that by about 1859 he was the largest antebellum cotton planter in Southeast Texas, working 70 to 80 enslaved people. The war cost him: it says he and his crew burned his steamer and 500 bales of cotton in 1862 to keep them from capture, and a Union patrol burned his Sabine Pass sawmill and house that October. He moved to Orange in 1873, and D. R. Wingate and Company began sawing in 1878. After his wife Caroline died in 1890 he took up rice.

What the plaque says

David Robert Wingate (1819-1899) In 1852 wealthy Mississippi sawmill owner David Robert Wingate moved his family to a large cotton plantation in Newton County. During the Civil War (1861-65), he donated lumber from his Sabine Pass sawmill to build Fort Sabine and other posts. Federal troops burned his home and business. In 1874 he relocated in Orange, bought into a sawmill, and branched into rice farming. Wingate served as county judge in Newton and Orange counties. Although plagued with fires and disasters, Judge Wingate rebuilt his holdings and continued to help others. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stark Museum of Art — 0.5 mi
  A white-marble museum in Orange built by the Stark Foundation and opened in 1978, holding Western art, American Indian art, Audubon's Birds of America and Steuben glass, free to enter.
• Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center — 1.3 mi
  More than 250 acres on Adams Bayou, begun by H. J. Lutcher Stark in 1937, with garden rooms, a cypress-tupelo swamp, a heronry blind and free pontoon tours in season.
• Museum of the Gulf Coast — 19 mi
  Port Arthur's regional museum in a former bank building: fossils, Native Americans, the petroleum story, a 125-foot history mural and Halls of Fame for musicians, athletes and artists.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 21 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• Captain George M. Levingston — steps away
• Evergreen Cemetery — steps away
• Dr. Samuel M. Brown — steps away
• John Thomas Stark — steps away