Joseph Alfred Woolfolk

The Handbook adds two schools: St. Mary's College near Lebanon, Kentucky, and the University of Missouri before his Louisville law degree. He resigned as county clerk in December 1861 to join a ranger company headquartered at Belknap. After the war he worked in his uncle's Louisville law office. One of his nine children was named for his friend Charles Goodnight. In Weatherford he raised cattle, and his family's home was the town's first brick residence. He later retired to his farm near Newcastle and was buried in the Woolfolk Cemetery, a mile northwest of Fort Belknap.

What the plaque says

A native of Kentucky, Joseph Alfred Woolfolk (1836-1918) earned a law degree from the University of Louisville in 1856. He moved to Belknap, texas, in 1858, and was hired by the Texas Emigration and Land Company to survey land grants in the Peters Colony. Licensed to practice law by the First District Court in Young County, he served as County Attorney and County Clerk. at the outbreak of the Civil War, Woolfolk joined a home guard Texas Rangers unit, and in late 1862 transferred into the regular Confederate army. Captured by Union troops in West Virginia in July 1863, he spent the remainder of the war in a prison camp in Ohio. Upon his release in 1865 he returned to his native Kentucky where he married Elizabeth J. Lewis (1846-1922). They became the parents of nine children. The Woolfolks returned to Texas in 1867 and settled in Weatherford. In 1871 Woolfolk gained notoriety when he was appointed by the court to defend Satanta and Big Tree, Kiowa Indians on trial for murder in the infamous Salt Creek massacre near Jacksboro. Woolfolk moved his family to a ranch in Young County in the late 1870s. He again served as County Attorney in 1881. He and Elizabeth are buried in a private family cemetery near this site. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Belknap — 2.3 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 11 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 32 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.

More markers nearby

• Two Miles Southwest to Fort Belknap — 1.6 mi
• Tonkawa Scouts, C.S.A. — 2.3 mi
• Camp Belknap, C.S.A. — 2.3 mi
• Major Robert S. Neighbors — 2.3 mi