Home Town of Texas Confederate General Elkanah Greer

Elkanah Greer reached Marshall in 1848 and worked as a merchant, planter and lawyer in a county where enslaved people made up 59 percent of the population in 1860. The Handbook of Texas says he became grand commander of the Knights of the Golden Circle in 1859 and offered Governor Sam Houston a regiment to invade Mexico in February 1860. In 1851 he had married Anna Holcombe at her family's Wyalucing. Later he was Commandant of Conscripts for the Trans-Mississippi Department, resigning in May 1865.

What the plaque says

Home Town of Texas Confederate General Elkanah Greer (1825-1877) Born Tennessee. Fought Mexican War. Came to Texas 1848. Commissioned colonel and raised 3rd Texas Cavalry. Attached to Ross' Texas Brigade. Fought at Wilson's Creek, Mo. Led brigade, division in Pea Ridge, Ark. Battle. Resigned commission but was recalled as brigadier general October 1862. Chief Conscription Bureau for Confederacy west of Mississippi 1863. Worked to reconcile Confederate and Texas draft laws. Commanded Texas Reserved Corps in 1864-65 keeping them in readiness to withstand threatened Union coastal invasion. Organized slave labor to build roads, fortifications for state defense. Buried Memphis, Tenn. Knights of the Golden Circle. (1963)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Harrison County Historical Museum — steps away
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 0.3 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 0.5 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 14 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.

More markers nearby

• James Harper Starr — steps away
• Governor Edward Clark — steps away
• Marshall — steps away
• Harrison County — steps away