Falls County

The 1936 marker credits farming and curative water. The Handbook of Texas counts 1,716 enslaved people in Falls County in 1860, 47 percent of the population, and says the county approved secession almost unanimously in 1861, with two slaveholders the only dissenters. The Black population went from 1,718 in 1860 to 4,681 in 1870. In January 1867, a Rosebud News report says, 435 freed people left South Carolina on the steamship Adele, recruited by Texans James Sanford Jones and Cornelius M. Summers for their land. Falls County was returned to Democratic rule in 1876.

What the plaque says

Falls County Created Jan. 28, 1850, from Limestone and Milam counties. Organized Aug. 5, 1850. Named for falls on the Brazos River which flow through the center of the county. White colonization in the area pre-dates the Texas Revolution, but colonists fled on news of Santa Anna's assault, 1836. John Marlin, for whom county seat was named, returned and settled near present city. Growth was steady and the first railroad reached the county in 1870. A center for farming, manufacturing and dairying. Curative artesian water gives Marlin recognition as a health spa.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Calvert — 21 mi
  A railroad cotton town of 1868 on State Highway 6 that claimed the largest cotton gin in the world and elected Black men to county and state office during Reconstruction.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 26 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 27 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 27 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• Sarahville de Viesca, Site of Colonial Capital — steps away
• Bucksnort — 3.2 mi
• Falls of the Brazos River — 4.3 mi
• Rev. Nelson T. Denson and Marlin Missionary Baptist Church — 4.6 mi