G. H. Ragsdale

Ragsdale was Cooke County's only permanent bird observer for twenty-eight years. The Handbook of Texas says he kept a collection of 600 eggs and skins of 165 types of bird by the early 1890s and published more than forty articles on birds, seventeen of them cited in Oberholser's The Bird Life of Texas. He supplied migration data for W. W. Cooke and fed material to a monograph on the English sparrow. He displayed his collection at county fairs and in 1891 at the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport, and he paid the bills through farming and taxidermy.

What the plaque says

G. H. Ragsdale (April 1, 1846 - March 25, 1895) Tennessee native George Henry Ragsdale came to Cooke County in 1867. He was elected to three terms as county surveyor. By observations and a self-taught education, he became an expert naturalist, chiefly in ornithology, small mammals, fossils and geology. Ragsdale acquired hundreds of specimens and bird eggs, donating and selling many to the Smithsonian Institution. He published dozens of articles, contributed to major studies and was cited in other works. Ragsdale had a column in the Gainesville Hesperian with advice on fauna, flora, geology and weather. His legacy is also seen in a fossil oyster (ostrea franklini ragsdalei) and snail (rabdotus dealbatus ragsdalei) named by his contemporaries. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Hanging Memorial — 0.8 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 23 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 23 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.

More markers nearby

• Dougherty, F. M. — steps away
• Fairview Cemetery — steps away
• James Menees Lindsay — steps away
• J. D. "Ikard" Sugg — steps away