Samuel Knight Lewis

The stopping place the plaque mentions was also a cotton plantation, and its labor was enslaved. Lewis bought William Townsend's 145-acre homestead from Capt. John York in 1848, added 640 acres of farmland and worked the place with 13 enslaved people, according to the Briscoe Center. In the mid-1850s he lobbied for a public road past his door, and the scattered Winedale community moved to cluster around the house. Beside Richter Cemetery lies the Connersville Primitive Baptist Church cemetery, where oral tradition holds that local slaveholders buried enslaved people before abolition.

What the plaque says

Samuel Knight Lewis (January 20, 1807 - November 14, 1867) South Carolina native Samuel K. Lewis married Marshall Ann Moore in 1830 and they settled on his Mississippi plantation. In 1838 the Lewis family was drawn to Texas. Originally a surveyor, Lewis served Austin County in the Republic of Texas House of Representatives in 1844-1845. In 1848 he learned of plans for a stage line to run through this area. He bought 145 acres near this site and settled his family there. The Lewis home became a stopping place for travelers later known as the Winedale Inn. Given to the University of Texas in the 1960s, it became a focal point of the nearby Winedale Historical Center. Recorded - 2000

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Round Top and Festival Hill — 1.4 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.
• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 14 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 18 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 19 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.

More markers nearby

• Bernard Scherrer — 1.3 mi
• Round Top Community — 1.4 mi
• Round Top — 1.4 mi
• Early Texas Hotels and Inns — 1.4 mi