Fred Rider Cotten

Cotten's law career lasted only until his father died. After serving as managing editor of the Daily Texan and studying law at the University of Texas, he took a Justice Department job in Washington, where the Handbook of Texas says an early assignment was the German torpedoing of the Lusitania. He came home to run the family undertaking business and furniture store, rarely sent bills and refused shoddy furniture. As Depression-era city commissioner he secured town loans with his personal note, which reportedly took twenty years to retire. He led the Texas State Historical Association in 1962.

What the plaque says

Fred Rider Cotten (1894-1974) Fred Rider Cotten was born to James Taylor and Sarah Ida (Rider) Cotten in Weatherford. In 1917, he completed a law degree at the Univ. of Texas. After returning to his hometown with his wife, Mary Virginia (Akard), and two children, Cotten ran the family furniture store, his swine farm, a funeral home, and Oakland Cemetery. In the 1930s, Cotten oversaw Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects such as the building of a new city hall and a major street renovation. He was, at one time or another, president of the Texas Swine Breeders, Texas Retail Furniture Dealers, Texas Funeral Directors, West Texas Historical, and Texas State Historical Associations, as well as the first president of the Parker County Historical Commission. 175 Years of Texas Independence * 1836-2011

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 1.2 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham — 0.2 mi
• Oliver Loving — 0.2 mi
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — 0.2 mi
• Bose Ikard — 0.3 mi