Jeff Hamilton

Hamilton's plaque says Sam Houston rescued him. The Handbook is plainer. In October 1853 a boy was taken from his mother in Huntsville to be sold so his owner, James McKell, could pay a whiskey bill, and Houston bought him. Houston freed his slaves in October 1862, and Hamilton stayed with the family. After the war he found his mother, who knew him by a burn scar on his leg, and an old Bible she kept gave him his birth date and his father's name.

What the plaque says

Jeff Hamilton Jeff Hamilton, Associate of Governor Sam Houston Born a slave in Kentucky, Jeff Hamilton was still a child when Sam Houston rescued him from purchase by a cruel master at a slave auction. Hamilton was Houston's personal servant during his term as governor, 1859-1861, and was at his bedside when he died in 1863. Hamilton later became the custodian for Baylor Female College (now Mary Hardin-Baylor College) when it was located in Independence. He moved to Belton with the institution in 1886 and worked here until 1889. Before his death in 1941, Hamilton was honored by numerous groups for his association with Sam Houston. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 7.3 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Mother Neff State Park — 18 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• A Memorial to Civil War Education in Texas — steps away
• Scott and White School of Nursing — steps away
• The Curtis Mansion — 0.2 mi
• African American Education in Belton — 0.4 mi