Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham

Lanham spent two decades in Congress arguing for the West. The Handbook of Texas says voters in the ninety-eight-county "jumbo" Eleventh District sent him to Washington in 1882, and he served five terms until 1893. He lost the 1894 governor's nomination to Charles Culberson, then returned in 1896 for the Eighth District until January 1903. He represented cattlemen, pursued claims for Indian depredations and chaired the committees on Claims and on Irrigation of Arid Lands. He retired to Weatherford, was named a University of Texas regent in 1907, and died there on July 29, 1908.

What the plaque says

Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham S.W.T. Lanham was born on July 4, 1846 to James and Louisa (Tucker) Lanham in South Carolina. He joined the Confederate Army in 1861, serving in the Third South Carolina Infantry, and was wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, 1864. He wed Sarah Meng in 1866, and they moved to north Texas, relocating in 1868 to Weatherford, where he became a lawyer. He gained notoriety as a district attorney in the Warren Wagontrain Raid cases, and he served five terms as U.S. Congressman between 1882 and 1903. He began his first of two terms as Governor in 1902. Lanham retired to Weatherford in 1907 and served as a University of Texas regent. He died in 1908. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 1.1 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

• Oliver Loving — steps away
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — steps away
• Bose Ikard — steps away
• Fred Rider Cotten — 0.2 mi