Navarro County

The Handbook of Texas lets the county's slaveholding be counted. In 1850 Navarro County had 2,190 residents, 247 of them Black, and in Corsicana about 300 of 1,200 people were reportedly enslaved. By 1861 the county held 1,920 enslaved people, valued at $3,440,000. On February 23, 1861, voters chose secession 213 to 3, and over 60 percent of the county's white men eventually wore Confederate uniforms. The entry gives the totals but no names of the enslaved or of the people who held them.

What the plaque says

Navarro County Formed from Robertson County. Created April 25, 1846; organized July 13, 1846. Named in honor of Jose Antonio Navarro, 1795-1871, soldier, patriot and statesman, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Member of the Texas Congress 1838. Commissioner on the Santa Fe Expedition, delegate in 1845 to the Constitutional Convention. County seat, Corsicana.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 2.5 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 23 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 29 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Samuel R. Frost — 1.9 mi
• Former Site of Fred Douglass - G.W. Jackson School — 1.9 mi
• Rex Ingram — 1.9 mi
• American Well & Prospecting Company — 1.9 mi