Joel Ponton

Joel Ponton preached and practiced medicine in the same years, and the Handbook calls him probably the earliest preacher of Alexander Campbell's movement, then called Reformed Baptist, to work in Texas. His church ties are first documented in 1842. A Comanche attack in 1840 killed his companion Tucker Foley and nearly killed Ponton. By 1859, when an Austin minister visited, he was doctoring to support a large family and preaching little, yet the visitor called him the only Christian Church preacher within sixty miles. He founded the Church of Christ at Ezzell.

What the plaque says

Joel Ponton (July 3, 1802 - February 1, 1875) Born in Virginia. Came to Texas 1833. Settled first at Gonzales. Served in the 1836 Texas War for Independence. Later moved to his land here on the Navidad, where he was a farmer, minister of the gospel, frontier doctor, and merchant. In 1840 Comanche Indians shot him and left him for dead with two arrows in his back, but he recovered. He served as Lavaca County judge, 1866-67. Ponton married five times; was father of nineteen children. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 11 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 17 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 25 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.

More markers nearby

• Ezzell School — 2.5 mi
• The United Methodist Church of Hope — 5.6 mi
• John Himes Livergood — 5.7 mi
• Petersburg — 7.8 mi