Richard S. Stokes

The Carnegie Hero Fund's account of the rescue is close and exact. Ashley Greaves, a 21-year-old assistant bank cashier, and fourteen-year-old Eva Foster stepped into swift, deep water thirty feet from the bank and went under, and fifteen-year-old Lillie Evetts followed them in. None of the three could swim. Stokes, then retired, swam out though his wife and daughter called to him not to. Lillie seized his collar and Greaves his neck, with Eva clinging to Greaves, and he swam fifteen feet across the current to a ledge, standing in water to his chin.

What the plaque says

Richard S. Stokes Joined Confederate Army, as a private, Aug. 7, 1861; was promoted to 1st Lt., Co. I, 8th Infantry, Miss. Regiment, on Aug. 29, 1864. Came to Texas in 1868, settled in Lampasas County as a rancher and farmer; married Elizabeth Rawson, and had seven children. On July 19, 1911, at Chadwick's Mill, on the Colorado River, at age 73, Stokes rescued Lillie B. Evetts, Eva Foster, and R. Ashley Greaves from drowning. For the feat, he received a Carnegie Hero Medal. Recorded - 1973

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Colorado Bend State Park — 19 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Hancock Springs Park — 22 mi
  Lampasas's city park on Sulphur Creek, with a spring-fed swimming pool that holds about 69 degrees all year, the walls of the old bathhouse and a golf course.

More markers nearby

• Long Cove Baptist Church — steps away
• Pleasant Grove Cemetery — 4.7 mi
• Site of Lometa Reservoir — 4.8 mi
• Phantom Hill Road — 5.9 mi