Millican, C.S.A.

The plaque follows the cotton; the people who grew it appear in the census. Brazos County counted 148 enslaved people in 1850 and 1,063 in 1860, according to the Handbook of Texas. Millican was incorporated in 1864 and had about 3,000 residents, with a Confederate training camp of about 5,000 troops. Federal troops arrived in June 1865. During Reconstruction, Black children in the county attended school for the first time at Millican and at Wilson's Plantation. By 1868 the town held about 1,200 people.

What the plaque says

Millican, C.S.A. Millican was Texas' northernmost railroad terminus when the war between the states began in 1861. It became a vital Confederate shipping point for the area extending to the Red River on the north and to be frontier settlements in the west. The products of that region moved over the rails of the Houston and Texas Central Railroads from Millican to Houston, Beaumont, Galveston and Alleyton. Confederate troops came by rail to nearby Camp Speight, a training and rendezvous point. Many marched overland from here for duty in Arkansas and Louisiana. Other entrained here for Houston and Beaumont where they borded ships for Neblett's Landing on the Sabine and other devarkation points. During the war cotton from North Texas and the Brazos Valley went to market through Millican to Alleyton, the state's southernmost railroad terminus, where it was transported over the cotton road by wagons and carts to Brownsville and Matamoros, Mexico. Returning wagons and carts brought military supplies and merchandise which eventually reached Millican by rail for wide distribution. Millican, which had been born with the coming of the railroad in 1859, flourished with the railroad, and declined with the northward extension of the railroad that began in 1866. (1962)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Navasota — 8.9 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.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 10 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.
• Star of the Republic Museum — 10 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.
• George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum — 13 mi
  The library of the forty-first president on the Texas A&M campus, opened in 1997, where George and Barbara Bush and their daughter Robin are buried in a family plot on the grounds.

More markers nearby

• Millican Massacre — 0.3 mi
• William Templeton Millican — 3.3 mi
• Wellborn Cemetery — 7.2 mi
• La Bahia Trail — 8.7 mi