Dr. William Watt White

The plaque puts Dr. White with Waul's Legion, raised in the spring of 1862 at Brenham by Thomas Neville Waul, who was commissioned colonel on May 17. The legion was captured when Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, and was soon exchanged. Waul became a brigadier general that September. After Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in April 1864, his brigade of Walker's Texas Division moved to Arkansas and helped turn back Frederick Steele's advance at Jenkins' Ferry on April 30, where Waul was wounded. The war the legion fought was a war to preserve slavery.

What the plaque says

Dr. William Watt White (1829 - 1914) Surgeon of Waul's Legion, Confederate Army. Came to Texas about 1850. In 1856 got M.D. degree in Philadelphia. During Civil War, saved many lives, but took typhoid, which contributed to loss of his eyesight. After blindness, practiced rest of his life. Was local educational and civic leader, this county. Confederate doctors had many problems with drug supply, surgical tools, horse-drawn ambulances and hospitals. Instruments had to be bought in Europe (shipped through naval blockade) or captured from the foe. Drugs came in by blockade - runner or were brought from North by ladies who hid them on their person: in pompadours, bustles, petticoats. Scarcities led to use of dogwood, willow and poplar bark tea as substitute for quinine. Mullein and other wild herbs were also medical substitutes. Garden poppies were milked for opium. Sutures were made of horsehair softened by boiling, or by raveling silk cloth. Female nurses were used for first time in army hospitals. This was first war to use anesthetics. Amputations left severed limbs stacked like wood around the field hospitals. Ambulances seemed never at hand for casualties; many died awaiting aid. Till the atom bomb, the Civil War was history's bloodiest. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 8.7 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 17 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 22 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 26 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.

More markers nearby

• Concrete College — 1.4 mi
• George Washington Davis — 2.4 mi
• Site of Cameron, First County Seat of DeWitt County — 5.6 mi
• Hochheim (Hoch's Home) — 5.8 mi