Galveston "News," C. S.A.

Alfred Horatio Belo grew up in a Moravian community in North Carolina and raised a company for the Fifty-sixth North Carolina Infantry in 1861. He fought in every major engagement of the Army of Northern Virginia from Manassas to Appomattox, rose to colonel, was severely wounded at Gettysburg, and had his left arm shattered at Cold Harbor. In 1865 he rode to Texas on horseback and joined the News. The Handbook dates the telephone line between his office and his home to 1876, two years before the plaque's 1878, and calls the 1842 founding by Bangs disputed.

What the plaque says

Galveston "News," C. S.A. Founded 1842 by Samuel Bangs, Texas' first printer. Published after 1843 by Willard Richardson, who put up the first 4-story building in Galveston to house the offices and printing plant. Soon after the Civil War began in 1861, cut back from a tri-weekly, to weekly. When Governor Francis R. Lubbock in 1862 asked civilians to evacuate, moved to Houston. Destroyed by fire in February, resumed publication in April on straw paper or yellow tissue, and with few columns. Galveston items came by messenger, while back home a Union sympathizer freely published "Flake's Bulletin." The "Texas Almanac," a sideline first put out in 1857 to attract immigration and summarize state events, was published in war years in Austin by David Richardson as the "Tri-Weekly Almanac Extra." Confederate veteran A. H. Belo joined the "News" staff in 1865 and in 1866 moved with it back to Galveston. In 1875, became chief owner of the "News" and "Texas Almanac." In 1878 he installed Texas' first telephone from his office to his home. With the founding of the Dallas "Morning News," Oct. 1, 1885, Belo became the first publisher with duplicate newspapers issued over 300 miles apart. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm — 3.2 mi
  The concrete wall along the Gulf that Galveston built after the hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people in a city of 38,000.
• Moody Mansion — 4.3 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 4.5 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.
• The Strand — 4.6 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.

More markers nearby

• William Tennant Austin — 2.5 mi
• The Rev. Henry P. Young — 2.6 mi
• Burial Site of David G. Burnet — 2.6 mi
• Peter Leroy Colombo — 2.8 mi