Dr. William P. Smith

The 1962 stone gives Smith a single line; his record runs much longer. Born in Tennessee on January 15, 1795, he was ordained a Methodist minister at Franklin in 1829 and came to Texas in January 1835. At Gonzales that October he urged the volunteers to resist, and on October 18 Stephen F. Austin named him surgeon of the army at the camp on the Cibolo. In Fayette County he served as coroner, postmaster and notary, helped charter Rutersville College, edited the Texas Monument and raised money for the Monumental Committee. He died on May 18, 1870.

What the plaque says

Dr. William P. Smith A veteran of the Texas War for Independence and regimental surgeon at San Jacinto Erected by the State of Texas 1962

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Round Top and Festival Hill — 11 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 12 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 14 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 16 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.

More markers nearby

• Fayetteville SPJST — 0.3 mi
• Phillip James Shaver — 0.3 mi
• Fayetteville — 0.3 mi
• Site of Svrcek Building — 0.3 mi