Samuel Wistar Johnson, M. D.

Corsicana's library began as a club project. A history on the Navarro County site says women's clubs opened a subscription library in 1901 in the Hardy-Peck building, led by Mrs. Rufus Hardy and Mrs. Maud Gordon, who raised $1,700 and gathered 1,200 volumes. Patrons paid a dollar a year. In 1904 the city commission passed an ordinance for a free library, chaired by the mayor, E. A. Johnson, and in October 1905 Corsicana won a $25,000 Carnegie grant. The board hired Zoe Faddis as librarian after dismissing its first choice.

What the plaque says

Samuel Wistar Johnson, M. D. (1853-1922) A native of Georgia, Samuel W. Johnson established his first medical practice in Atlanta. After moving to Texas and settling in Corsicana, he became a respected community physician and was elected mayor in 1900. During his term in office the public library was established, thanks to the efforts of the city's women's clubs. Johnson was also instrumental in the early oil industry in Corsicana. His first wife, Kate Beaton, died in 1904. In 1910 he married Sarah Pace. Johnson moved to Dallas in 1910 and died there in 1922. He is buried in Corsicana's Oakwood Cemetery. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 0.3 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 20 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 30 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.

More markers nearby

• Corsicana Public Library — steps away
• Corsicana City Jail of 1908 — steps away
• Corsicana — steps away
• The First National Bank of Corsicana — steps away