George Campbell Childress

Childress wrote the best-known document in Texas, but most of what followed went badly. In March 1836 President Burnet sent him and Robert Hamilton to Washington to seek recognition for the republic, and by late May their mission was ended and others took over. Childress came back to Texas in 1837, 1839 and 1841 to open law offices, first in Houston and then in Galveston, and none supported his family. He took his own life in Galveston on October 6, 1841. The county that carries his name was created in 1876.

What the plaque says

George Campbell Childress (January 8, 1804 - October 6, 1841) Born into a prominent Nashville, Tennessee, family, George Campbell Childress attended Davidson Academy (later the University of Nashville). He was admitted to the bar in 1828, the sam year he married Margaret Vance. She died in 1835, soon after the birth of a son. Childress first visited Texas in 1834, at the urging of his uncle, empresario Sterling Clark Robertson. He soon returned to Nashville, however, and worked as a newspaper editor. By January 1836, he had returned to Texas and settled in Robertson's colony. The following month Childress and Robertson were elected delegates to the Convention of 1836, where the Texas Declaration of Independence was adopted on March 2. Childress is considered to be the primary author of that document. Sent by the Republic of Texas to attain recognition of the new country by the United States, Childress was unsuccessful and returned to Tennessee for a time. While there he married Rebecca Stuart Jennings. By 1841 Childress was in Galveston in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a law practice. Despondent over his financial situation, he committed suicide on Oct. 6 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Thirty-five years later Childress County was named in his honor. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1859 Ashton Villa — 0.3 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 — 0.3 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.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 0.5 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.
• Moody Mansion — 0.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Texas Bar Association — steps away
• The Rt. Rev. Monsignor James Martin Kirwin — steps away
• Rabbi Henry Cohen — steps away
• Galveston in the Republic of Texas — steps away