Samuel P. Newcomb

Newcomb's best-known work was done inside a stockade that was never finished. In 1864 more than a hundred settlers forted up on the Clear Fork at Fort Davis and built homes within a space 300 by 325 feet; the stockade and blockhouses were planned but not built once the Indian threat eased. In 1865 Newcomb became the teacher, and his diary counts only nineteen pupils at first, most of them very rude and wild. He caught measles in an epidemic and died April 23, 1870. The marker stands in a cemetery on private land.

What the plaque says

Samuel P. Newcomb Born in Connecticut in 1839, Samuel P. Newcomb made his way alone to Texas at age 17, arriving in 1857. A schoolteacher, he settled at Fort Davis on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in Buchanan county. Newcomb held several public offices. In 1860 he was elected county clerk of Buchanan county (renamed Stephens county in 1861.) He became a surveyor when the commissioners court assigned him the task of surveying the boundaries of Stephens county. In 1861 Newcomb functioned as Justice of the Peace, and was appointed collector of the confederate war tax for eleven counties. He served in a Texas state troops ranger unit during the Civil War. His writings have proved an important primary source for historians and archeologists. As a diarist, Newcomb chronicled the daily life of the pioneers, and carefully described the physical appearance of Fort Davis. He also told of droves of buffalo nearby, what young people did for entertainment, and the treatment for the sick and dying. He married Susan Reynolds, who also became a diarist. Her writings reflect the conditions of the county, and the isolation of the settlers. Newcomb died at age 31 in 1870, and is buried here beside his first child, an infant son. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 14 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Fort Belknap — 21 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Old Jail Art Center — 23 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 26 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.

More markers nearby

• First Christian Church — 7.4 mi
• Murray Methodist Church — 10 mi
• Picketville — 12 mi
• Camp Breckenridge, C.S.A. — 13 mi