Site of Former Settlement of Richardson's Bluff

The Handbook of Texas says Benjamin Richardson ran a ferry on the Neches and was postmaster in 1839. After he died in 1849, the land passed to John A., Philip U. and Charles T. Ford, and the place was often called Ford's Bluff. Philip Ford died of yellow fever after a trip to New Orleans to buy sawmill machinery. In 1893 John Henry Kirby chartered the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City Railway, and Champion Paper and Fiber bought riverfront land here for a pulp mill in 1948. By the 1970s the Temple-Eastex mill dominated the local economy.

What the plaque says

Site of Former Settlement of Richardson's Bluff Homesite of Benjamin Richardson (1775?-1848?), an 1830 de Zavala colony settler. With his sons, Richardson operated a ferry that was of great service, especially in 1836 Runaway Scrape, aiding civilians as they fled toward the U.S. in fear of Santa Anna. Place later was renamed Ford's Bluff, for family with millsite here in 1852. In 1894 Mannie Cox opened a local shingle mill that was sold in 1902 to Kirby Lumber Company. When Kirby built sawmill in 1904, the site was renamed in honor of Miss Eva Dale, a teacher at the Southeast Texas Male and Female College in Jasper. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Village Creek State Park — 8.5 mi
  A 2,466-acre state park on one of the few free-flowing creeks in Texas, with a launch for the Village Creek Paddling Trail, boat rentals and sandy-upland trails in the Big Thicket.
• McFaddin-Ward House — 18 mi
  A Beaux-Arts Colonial Revival mansion finished in 1906 and lived in by one family for 75 years, with free guided tours of three furnished floors, the carriage house and gardens.
• Big Thicket National Preserve — 20 mi
  Start at the Kountze visitor center, where rangers sort the preserve's scattered units for you, and learn why Congress made this 1974 string of pearls the country's first national preserve.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 22 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• Harvey Houses of Silsbee — 5.9 mi
• Wiess Bluff — 6.4 mi
• William Williamson — 9.1 mi
• Thomas Holmes — 12 mi