_H7 Ranch

Barker grew up on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, which was running through by 1895, and took its name from the track-laying contractor, Ed Barker. George Miller became its first postmaster in 1898, in a two-story house that was also his store and telephone office. By 1915 eighty people lived there by rice farming, dairying and ranching, and trainloads of cattle left Barker's shipping pens. The Corps of Engineers finished the Barker dam on Buffalo Bayou, a dam 72,900 feet long, in February 1946, though the reservoir was already used for flood control in the spring of 1945.

What the plaque says

_H7 Ranch Emil Henry Marks (1881-1969), a descendant of Prussian immigrants, was orphaned at an early age and reared by his maternal grandparents in Addicks, Texas, and later by relatives in Pattison, Texas. Marks registered the _H7 cattle brand in 1898. He married Maud May Smith in 1907. They raised longhorn cattle in Addicks and in 1917 relocated their expanding herd to a 640-acre ranch in Barker, Texas. By the early 1930s their herd had increased to 6,816 head of cattle and their grazing land had expanded to 36,000 acres. A barbecue and rodeo held by Marks during spring roundup and branding activities in 1918 became such a popular annual event that he expanded the rodeo facilities and began charging admission. _H7 rodeos, a showplace for Marks' premier longhorn cattle, ended in 1950 after much of his Barker ranch was inundated by the creation of the Barker Flood Control Reservoir. Marks helped found the South Texas Producers' Association (1931), Houston's Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1932), the Salt Grass Trail Drive (1952), and the Texas Longhorn Breeders' Association of America (1964). In 1936 he broke ground for the San Jacinto Monument with _H7 oxen. The heirs of Emil and Maud Marks continued to raise longhorn cattle and use the _H7 brand. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 17 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 18 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 18 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 19 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Gray Lodge No. 329, A. F. & A. M. — 3.5 mi
• Bear Creek Methodist Church and Cemetery — 3.6 mi
• Dairy (Alief) — 7.1 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Katy — 8.2 mi