General Matthew D. Ector

Ector's Brigade was formed in November 1862 from the Tenth, Eleventh and Fourteenth Texas Dismounted Cavalry and the Douglas Battery, later joined by the Fifteenth Texas and, from 1863, two North Carolina regiments. At Murfreesboro it joined the first assault on the Union right on the morning of December 31, 1862, losing thirty-eight killed and 308 wounded in one day. It marched to Mississippi in the attempt to relieve Vicksburg and fought in the siege of Jackson, then lost fifty-nine killed, 239 wounded and 138 missing at Chickamauga.

What the plaque says

General Matthew D. Ector Enlisted 1861. Lieutenant 3rd Texas Cavalry. Fought Arkansas, Missouri and Indian territory. As colonel led 14th Texas Cavalry Kentucky invasion. Made brigadier general 1862 to command famed Ector's brigade in Tennessee and Mississippi battles. Wounded four times without leaving Chickamauga field. Under constant fire 70 days in Georgia. Lost leg in Atlanta 1864. Assigned to defense of Mobile, Alabama. A memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy erected by the state of Texas 1963, (1963)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 0.4 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 9.0 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 11 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 19 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Ector County Courthouse — steps away
• Ector County Land Rush — steps away
• Site of The Odessa Sanitarium — steps away
• Odessa Land & Townsite Company — steps away