Matagorda County

In 1870 Matagorda County had 3,377 residents, and 2,120 of them were Black, nearly two in three. Freedmen registered to vote in 1867, and Black residents held county and state office in the 1880s. The Ku Klux Klan worked against them during Reconstruction, and the White Man's Union Association was active by 1894. Republican votes, the party of the freedmen, fell from 561 for McKinley in 1896 to 90 for Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. The county that voted its seat to Bay City in 1894 was then roughly three in four Black.

What the plaque says

Matagorda County Organized March 6, 1834, into the Mexican municipality of Matagorda created a county of the same name in 1836, organized in 1837. Named for the Bay on which it fronts. County seat, Matagorda 1837-1894 Bay City, since.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 19 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 24 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.

More markers nearby

• Ira Ingram, First Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives — steps away
• Bay City Post Office — steps away
• Matagorda, C.S.A. — steps away
• St. Mark's Episcopal Church — steps away