Peter W. Gray

Back in Houston after the war, Gray built his law practice into one of the largest in the South. He and Walter Browne Botts had founded it in 1866 as Gray and Botts, and when James Addison Baker joined in 1872 it began the line of names that became Baker Botts. Gray was elected first president of the Houston Bar Association in 1870. Earlier he had helped found the Houston Lyceum, forerunner of the Houston Public Library, and his money helped Henderson Yoakum complete his History of Texas. He died of tuberculosis in Houston on October 3, 1874.

What the plaque says

Peter W. Gray County Named for Texas Confederate 1819-1876 Virginia-born, came to Texas 1838. Aided 1839 removal Texas Shawness. Officer in Milam Guards, Texas Republic. Political, cultural leader in Houston, Republic, State, and Confederacy: he was district attorney, judge, Justice Texas Supreme Court, Legislator in Texas and C.S.A. Delegate to Texas Secession Convention that raised troops to seize U.S. forts, provided for Texas frontier defense, and ratified C.S.A. Constitution. Gray in 1864 became Treasury Agent for the "amputated" C.S.A. Sector West of the Mississippi River. There, in effect, he was Treasury Secretary for a land in chaos. Smuggled currency was scarce. Often it was hijacked. No western press could be found to print notes. Couriers and Pony Express were Gray's "wireless" to the Confederate capital. Ammunition, arms, medicines, factory goods vital to the war effort had to be imported for Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, as well as for Texas. Blockade-runners exported cotton via Havana to Europe. Cattle and cotton went to market in Mexico, as Gray served the gallant Confederacy. A Memorial to Texans Who Served the Confederacy. Erected by the State of Texas 1963

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White Deer Land Museum — 0.2 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 0.3 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Roberts County Museum — 21 mi
  The county museum in Miami's old Santa Fe depot, holding mammoth bones and Clovis points from a 1934 dig, in the cow town that has held a cow-calling contest since 1949.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 26 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• Gray County 50th Year Anniversary — steps away
• Pampa — steps away
• Vittorio Emanuel von Brunow, M. D. — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Pampa — 0.2 mi