Judge Edwin Waller

Edwin Waller died on January 3, 1881, and his dates have drifted on stone ever since. The State Cemetery has him in Austin working as a commissioner when he died, while his headstone says Waller County. He and his wife Juliet de Shields Waller, who died May 13, 1867, were buried first in a family cemetery in this county and moved to Austin in 1928, with the headstone added in 1936. They had seven children. County plaques give his death as 1861 and 1883, and this one his birth as March 16, not the State Cemetery's November 4.

What the plaque says

Judge Edwin Waller (March 16, 1800 -- January 3, 1881) Virginia native Edwin Waller migrated to Texas from Missouri in 1831 as part of Stephen F. Austin's third colony. An active participant in the earliest stages of Texas' struggle for independence, Waller participated in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, served as Alcalde of Brazoria, and represented the town of Columbia in the consultation of 1835 at San Felipe. A framer of Texas' Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Waller also served in the army during the 1836 Texas revolution. After the war he became postmaster general and later a land commissioner for the new Republic. In 1839, as a government agent, he platted the townsite of Austin, the new capital of Texas. The next year he became the first mayor of the city. Resigning during his first term, he moved to his plantation home, just north of this site. The Waller plantation was the center of a large rural area. Here Waller opened a post office and store and provided for a school and church. For many years he also served as Austin County judge. In 1873 a new county, which included this area, was formed form Austin and Grimes Counties and named in his honor. Buried on his plantation, his body was later reinterred in the state cemetery at Austin.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 4.4 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.

More markers nearby

• Isaac Best — 1.5 mi
• James Tarrant Pattison Homesite — 2.3 mi
• Early Roads to San Felipe — 4.4 mi
• Stephen F. Austin — 4.4 mi