Lallie P. Carlisle

Texas women could not vote in 1902, when Lallie Briscoe became Hunt County clerk. The plaque calls her the first woman in Texas to hold an elective office, yet describes an appointment by the Commissioners' Court on April 17, 1902 to finish her husband's term. A city history repeats the first claim and calls the office elective. Women gained the primary vote in Texas only when Governor Hobby signed the law on March 26, 1918, and the state ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on June 28, 1919.

What the plaque says

Lallie P. Carlisle (1866-1949) First woman in Texas to hold an elective public office. Upon death of her first husband, E. W. Briscoe, she was appointed, April 17, 1902, by the Commissioners' Court to complete his term as clerk of Hunt County. At that time women could not vote in Texas. A ruling by the Attorney General of Texas upheld the appointment. Mrs. Briscoe, mother of five, later married C. C. Carlisle. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 0.9 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 25 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 29 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Site of Phillips Field/Majors Stadium — 0.4 mi
• The Seven Courthouses of Hunt County — 0.5 mi
• Greenville's Electric Light Plant — 0.6 mi
• Greenville — 0.6 mi