Parker County, C.S.A.

Behind the plaque's regiments stands a county that held people in bondage. The Handbook of Texas counts 4,213 residents in 1860, among them 222 enslaved people. Nine companies of about eighty men each left to serve the Confederacy, and by 1870 the county had 148 farms and ranches against 397 ten years earlier, with milk cows down from about 3,400 to 1,200. The 1870 census counted 293 African Americans among 4,186 residents. The Handbook says the last recorded Native raid in the county came in 1874, and growth followed through the decade.

What the plaque says

Parker County, C.S.A. Part of a colonial grant to S.M. Williams and Stephen F. Austin, father of Texas, but with no permanent settlers before 1850, this county was created in 1855 and named for Isaac Parker, its legislative sponsor. By 1860 it had 4,213 people and in 1861 its voters favored secession 535 to 61. Oliver Loving, a settler, was an official stock raiser, furnishing beef to the Confederacy in the Civil War. He and 18 other men organized a full-time patrol against the frequent, bloody Indian raids. Citizens of adjacent counties took refuge here. In 1864 three local men were charged with treason. One admitted inviting federal General J.G. Blunt to come from the Cherokee nation and give Parker County protection from the Indians. General John R. Baylor, a local rancher, was an officer in the Arizona-New Mexico campaign to make the Confederacy an ocean-to-ocean nation, and after victories there became Governor of Arizona. He was in the Confederate Congress from 1863 to 1865. Parker County sent the Confederate army nine companies. Its Company E, 19th Texas Cavalry, served in Parsons' Brigade--which fought over 20 engagements in three years with considerable distinction. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 0.7 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Weatherford — steps away
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — 0.3 mi
• Prince Memorial CME Church — 0.3 mi
• Bose Ikard — 0.3 mi