Governor S.W.T. Lanham

Lanham reached Weatherford as a schoolteacher in a log cabin. The Handbook of Texas says he left South Carolina in October 1866 with nineteen other people, arrived in Red River County that December, and taught at a country school near Clarksville and later at Old Boston. In 1868 he moved to Weatherford, taught in one room of a log cabin and lived in the other, and joined the Masons. He was admitted to the bar in 1869, and in 1871 Governor Edmund J. Davis appointed him district attorney of the Thirteenth District.

What the plaque says

Governor S.W.T. Lanham (July 4, 1846 - July 29, 1908) A South Carolinian, Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham volunteered at age 15 and fought 1861-65 in the Civil War. In 1866 he married Sarah Beona Meng and moved to Texas. The Lanhams taught school, first in Bowie County, then in Weatherford. Admitted to the bar in 1869, Lanham in 1871 became district attorney for five counties, including Parker. Also in 1871 he began to build his home at this site, enlarging it later. His speeches in 1871 at the trial of Indian chiefs in the Warren Wagon Train Massacre brought him fame at age 25. Elected United States Congressman in 1882 for the 98-county "jumbo" district of West Texas, he served as a national lawmaker for 17 years. S.W.T. Lanham was the last Confederate veteran to be governor of Texas, 1903-07. He led in reviving East Texas iron works, began fiscal balance practices in state government, and invoked social justice. Laws made in response to his policies covered vital tax reforms, child labor curbs, uniform textbooks, and the Terrell Election Law to enable voters to nominate officials by ballot rather than in conventions. Governor and Mrs. Lanham had eight children, including U.S. Congressman Fritz Lanham. The Ex-Governor died here at his home and is buried in Weatherford. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 0.4 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 — 21 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

• Prince Memorial CME Church — 0.4 mi
• Weatherford — 0.5 mi
• Parker County, C.S.A. — 0.5 mi
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — 0.8 mi