Madison "Matt" "Kilpatrick"

Madison Kilpatrick was born enslaved in Alabama in October 1829, and not in 1892 as the plaque's date reads. His owner, Sam Oliver, took him to Louisiana and then to Austin County, Texas, and he married Bettie in Louisiana in 1863. By 1870 he owned a 400-acre farm near Hempstead and a blacksmith shop. Waller County's voters elected him its first treasurer in 1873 and again in 1876. He remained a Republican boss for much of the late nineteenth century and died December 1, 1910.

What the plaque says

Madison "Matt" "Kilpatrick" (1892 - Dec. 1, 1910) Came to Waller County as a runaway slave from Alabama before Civil War. Married Betty Bradford, of Woodard Plantation, Hempstead; had 8 children. A talented blacksmith, he specialized in improving farm implements; became a landowner, freedmen's leader; served as first treasurer, Waller County, 1873-76. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Star of the Republic Museum — 16 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Navasota — 20 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Hempstead High School — 1.2 mi
• Former Waller County Post Offices — 1.2 mi
• Hempstead, C.S.A. — 1.2 mi
• Waller County — 1.2 mi