First Texas Artificial Gas Plant

A 1936 county history describes the plant at work. J. M. Thomas, called "Gas House Thomas," was its sole owner and operator. Water collected in the iron mains, and a worker with a hand pump spent much of the day clearing it. A large drum rose through the day and sank at night, its weight pressing the gas out to the street globes. The history says the drum's foundation still stood near the business district. The Handbook of Texas dates Jefferson's first gas lighting to 1867, three years before the plaque's 1870 charter, and calls it natural gas.

What the plaque says

First Texas Artificial Gas Plant (5 blocks east) Jefferson Gas Light Company, chartered 1870 for public and domestic service, used retorts-- 7 foot iron drums with small necks-- to make illuminating gas. (One retort stood on this site.) Loaded with pine knots and rich pine wood, a retort was heated; its gas was forced into mains by use of a pressure drum. Street lights on hollow posts, 300 feet apart, were 10-candle glass globes, lighted by a man on a ladder. These and gaslights in houses gave Jefferson-- then largest inland port and second largest city in Texas-- the state's first gaslight system. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jefferson Historical Museum — steps away
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.
• Excelsior House Hotel — steps away
  A brick-and-timber hotel at 211 West Austin that began as a river captain's boarding house in 1858 and was revived by a garden club in 1959, and still takes guests with rosewood furniture.
• Caddo Lake State Park — 11 mi
  A Civilian Conservation Corps park on the Texas shore of Caddo Lake, where the Caddo told of a lake made by wind-driven water and visitors now paddle Big Cypress Bayou past moss-hung bald cypress.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.

More markers nearby

• Sterne Fountain — steps away
• Immaculate Conception Catholic Church — steps away
• Captain William Perry — steps away
• The Brooks House — steps away