Humphrey and Sarah Merriman Jackson

The town that grew near the Jacksons' land was named for G. J. Crosby, a railroad construction engineer. Charlie Karcher opened its first store in 1865, and it became a retail and shipping point for lumber and farm goods from between the San Jacinto River and Cedar Bayou. A post office came in 1877, and by 1884 Crosby had fifty people, a school, a Baptist church and a general store. Local legend gave it the nickname Lick Skillet by 1898. It became a banking center in 1929 and counted 2,500 people and fifty businesses in 1976.

What the plaque says

Humphrey and Sarah Merriman Jackson Humphrey (1784-1833), Sarah Merriman Jackson (1796-1823), and their family came to Texas as members of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colony in 1823 and settled east of the San Jacinto River. Jackson's land grant opened up the San Jacinto District and expanded the perimeter of Austin's grant, providing an additional area for Anglo settlement. Sarah was mother to four children and died one year after settling in Texas. Humphrey and Sarah Jackson are buried nearby. The zinc marker at their grave site was built by the Monumental Bronze Works of Bridgeport, Connecticut. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 11 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 21 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Emancipation Park — 21 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 22 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

• Humphrey Jackson — 1.7 mi
• Harrison Barrett — 2.2 mi
• Lynch's Ferry — 8.2 mi
• Hannah Este Burnet — 9.6 mi