Jared Ellison Groce

The village that kept the name grew up around a stage stop, not the house. A stagecoach line linking Houston, Retreat, Anderson and Springfield began about 1851, and that year Josiah W. Ogden opened the post office two miles east of Groce's old home. The McAlpine, Wallace, White and Weaver families farmed there in the 1850s. After the Civil War, Black families including the Bennetts, Hearnes, Pratts and Coopers came to farm, and Black residents built Pleasant Hill Baptist Church. By the mid-1880s Retreat had a gin, a gristmill and about 75 people; by the 1980s, two families.

What the plaque says

Jared Ellison Groce Site of the home built in 1833 by Jared Ellison Groce (1782-1836) Generally known as "Groce's Retreat." Here he died November 20, 1836. The name "Retreat" was continued for a post office and village two miles to the east after the house was torn down.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Navasota — 9.9 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• Star of the Republic Museum — 10 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 10 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Fanthorp Inn State Historic Site — 15 mi
  A cedar-log dogtrot cabin of 1834 on the road through Anderson that grew into a seventeen-room inn and post office for travelers of the Republic, kept by one family until 1976.

More markers nearby

• Lynn Grove United Methodist Church — 2.3 mi
• White Hall School — 2.7 mi
• McAlpine Cemetery — 2.9 mi
• Courtney Cemetery — 3.9 mi