Head of Elm (Saint Jo)

The soldiers on the bronze belonged to a regiment built for this frontier. Congress authorized the Second United States Cavalry on March 4, 1855, expressly for Texas service, and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis named Albert Sidney Johnston its first colonel. Robert E. Lee commanded it that spring while it was organizing. Four of the Confederate Army's full generals came from its officers: Johnston, Lee, Edmund Kirby Smith and John Bell Hood. Johnston camped at Head of Elm that year on the way west, long before the town took the name Saint Jo.

What the plaque says

Head of Elm (Saint Jo) 1849-Capt. Randolph B. Marcy U.S. Government Survey Trip; 1854-Capt. John Pope Surveying proposed Federal Railroad; 1855-U.S. 2nd Cavalry Under Col. Albert Sidney Johnson en route to establish Texas Frontier forts, reported settlement here; 1857-Col. James B. Llach Heading "corn train" to Fort Belknap; 1860-First U.S. Post Office John W. Womble Post Master; 1873-Saint Jo Founded On site by Capt. I.H. Boggess & I.A. Bowell. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stonewall Saloon Museum — steps away
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.
• Great Hanging Memorial — 23 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Lake Murray State Park — 35 mi
  Oklahoma's first and largest state park, built by New Deal crews on former Chickasaw Nation land south of Ardmore, with Tucker Tower, a governors' retreat never finished, on a point above the lake.

More markers nearby

• Town of Saint Jo — 0.2 mi
• Dye Mound Cemetery — 6.8 mi
• Muenster — 8.8 mi
• Montague Cemetery — 11 mi