Dr. D. Port Smythe

Smythe was a botanist as well as a doctor. In 1852, soon after settling at Centerville and marrying Mary Young, he traveled to Palo Pinto, identifying much of the flora along the way and logging landmarks such as Ham's Hole in Johnson County and Gifford's Peak in Hood County; his journal ran in the Leon Pioneer that year. As college physician at Texas A&M, he was paid from a five-dollar assessment on each student. He blamed the illness of 1882-83 on the college's lack of bathing facilities and helped begin its botany and veterinary programs.

What the plaque says

Dr. D. Port Smythe (1824-1889) Pioneer Lockhart physician, from Alabama. Studied medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Was Civil War surgeon, Texas Mounted Rifles and Cavalry, on Texas frontier and in Louisiana, Arkansas and Indian Territory. Typical of Texas Confederates, his letters home show concern for wife and children: contain instructions on teaching child to read, crops, plowing, animal care, fences, debt collection. Professor of chemistry, 1871, Galveston Medical college. A&M College physician, 1879-82. First to serve full time in any Texas college or university. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 0.4 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 16 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 21 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Gruene Historic District — 28 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• Battle of Plum Creek — 0.2 mi
• Caldwell County — 0.4 mi
• Susanna Dickinson Hannig - Messenger of the Alamo — 0.5 mi
• Bethel Primitive Baptist Church — 8.4 mi