Founding of Town of Marion, 1877

Born in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1818, he founded the Boston house of Peirce and Bacon in 1843, opened a Galveston branch in 1852 and ran fifteen packet ships carrying Texas cotton, sugar and hides. In 1870 he was among the investors who bought the bankrupt Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado and rechartered it as the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio. He set up an immigration bureau to settle the nearly 1.5 million acres granted to the line, and at his death in 1885 he owned more than 700,000 acres in Texas.

What the plaque says

Founding of Town of Marion, 1877 The Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway was chartered in 1870 to give interior Texas ready access to Gulf of Mexico ports. As the tracks proceeded west of the Guadalupe, Col. Thomas W. Peirce (1818-85), major investor in the G.H. & S.A., bought land here near a country store and hotel. Platting a town named for his daughter, he obtained a U.S. Post Office on May 31, 1877. A public sale of lots was held on June 20, 1877. Within a year, Marion's 3-acre railyard was known for vast quantities of shipping. By 1900, public school, churches, and other facilities were thriving. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 8.9 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 12 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Natural Bridge Caverns — 15 mi
  The largest known cavern in Texas, found in 1960 by four college cavers under a ranch family's land, entered beneath a 60-foot limestone bridge and still growing.
• The Alamo — 23 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.

More markers nearby

• Marion Public Schools — steps away
• St. Paul Church — 5.2 mi
• Schertz — 7.9 mi
• Carl Heinrich Guenther — 7.9 mi