Site of Old Gilmer

The plaque names the W. H. Hart home, and a 1946 county history tells who he was. Captain William H. Hart came in 1843 as a land surveyor and built a log house on the Cherokee Trace. He had followed his sweetheart, Evaline Kelsey, from Tennessee to Marshall, where her father was a physician and Methodist preacher. Hart was the county's first clerk and went to the legislature in 1856, riding to Austin on horseback. Houston and John Reagan were among the lawyers who came to court at his house.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Gilmer Here on the Cherokee Trace was early Gilmer. On this spot in 1845 the first Upshur County Court convened under an oak. In spring 1846, Judge O. M. Roberts designated the nearby W. H. Hart home as courthouse until a permanent county seat could be "carefully located." Old Gilmer Cemetery is one mile north.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 22 mi
  A 1987 state park on a 9,000-acre reservoir, where a Republic of Texas stockade called Fort Sherman stood in 1838 and the Caddo lived from A.D. 800 to 1860, now with fishing piers, trails and cabins.
• Daingerfield State Park — 24 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.
• Tyler State Park — 26 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 30 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Gilmer — 2.0 mi
• First Baptist Church of Gilmer — 2.0 mi
• The Looney School — 2.1 mi
• Upshur County, C. S. A. — 2.2 mi