Erwin Evans Smith

Erwin Smith's pictures reached the public through other people. The Handbook of Texas says forty enlargements of his range photographs stopped crowds at a Boston exhibit in 1908, and George Pattullo of the Boston Herald, who wrote about him, became his closest friend and traveled the Southwest with him. Smith returned to Texas in 1914 to ranch and by 1917 was bankrupt. In 1949, 1,800 of his plates and films went to the Library of Congress. His half-sister, Mary Alice Pettis, later set up a foundation for scholarships in photographic history.

What the plaque says

Erwin Evans Smith (August 22, 1886 - September 4, 1947) Artist-photographer Erwin Evans Smith, a Fannin County native, was enchanted as a youth with the culture and folklore of ranching in the southwest. He studied art in Chicago and Boston in hopes of becoming a western sculptor. For several summers in the early 1900s, he visited ranches to sketch and photograph cowboys at work and leisure. He never realized his dream of sculpting but left over 2000 photographs as a priceless record of life on the range. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 21 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 22 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Oakwood Cemetery — steps away
• Samuel Augustus Erwin — steps away
• James G. Gilmer — steps away
• James Thomas Holt — 0.2 mi