Thomas Ingles Smith

Smith's service record has chapters the plaque skips. He served as a ranger under George Erath in 1840, joined volunteers who answered the 1842 raids on San Antonio, and was wounded at Salado Creek on September 18. That autumn he enlisted in the Somervell expedition and was elected third lieutenant, but he turned back to San Antonio with Somervell and so escaped capture at Mier. In 1846 he raised a company for the Mexican War, and in April 1847 he beat Henry McCulloch in the vote for command of a battalion that defended the western frontier.

What the plaque says

Thomas Ingles Smith (1800-1848) Thomas Ingles Smith was born in 1800 in Virginia and was a soldier in the War of 1812 in a company commanded by his father, General Bird B. Smith. Smith arrived in Texas late in 1836, and soon enlisted in the Republic of Texas army under Gen Felix Huston. He was wounded in the Battle of the Salado in September 1842. In December of that year President Sam Houston sent a small group of Rangers under the command of Smith and Eli Chandler to move the archives of the Republic to Washington-on-the-Brazos. The citizens of Austin, in a show of force, prevented the move in what became known as the Archive War. By 1843 Smith was living along Chambers Creek in present Ellis County, and in 1844 was a Texas Ranger and Indian Scout. He commanded the Robertson County Rangers along the frontier in 1845. As commissioner to negotiate with the Indians, he signed the last treaty made by the Republic of Texas. Fort Smith, one of a line of fortifications from the Colorado to Red River, was established in 1846 and named for Thomas I. Smith. Along with two partners, he gave land for the townsite of Corsicana, and was a member of the commission to locate the Navarro County seat in 1848. He died in Austin in March 1848. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 0.5 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 — 21 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 in 1860-1872 — steps away
• Jose Antonio Navarro — steps away
• Site of the First Courthouse — steps away
• Judge E. J. Simkins House — steps away