Walter P. Acker

The home where Acker died was the work of Confederate veterans themselves. The John B. Hood Camp of United Confederate Veterans chartered it in 1884, bought land on West Sixth Street in Austin and opened it on November 1, 1886. The state took it over in 1891. More than 2,000 former Confederates lived there between 1887 and 1953; there were 312 residents in 1929 and thirty-eight by 1938, when their average age was ninety-three. The last, Thomas Riddle, died in 1954 at 108. The buildings were razed in 1970.

What the plaque says

Walter P. Acker Walter Acker joined the Confederate Army in Paulding, Mississippi at age 16. He arrived in Lampasas in 1875 as an attorney with his second wife, Elizabeth. He was elected district attorney in 1878. state representative in 1883, and mayor in 1901. In 1910 Acker moved to Harris County and served three terms in the State Legislature from that district. In 1930 he was honored as the last confederate veteran to serve in the Texas Legislature. He died at the Confederate Home in Austin (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hancock Springs Park — 1.6 mi
  Lampasas's city park on Sulphur Creek, with a spring-fed swimming pool that holds about 69 degrees all year, the walls of the old bathhouse and a golf course.
• Colorado Bend State Park — 17 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Inks Lake State Park — 25 mi
  A state park on a constant-level lake of the Colorado, between Buchanan and Inks dams, with pink granite and gneiss at the water and CCC work along Park Road 4.
• Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery — 27 mi
  A free federal hatchery below Inks Dam on the Colorado, with thirty production ponds that draw birds and a look at how fish are raised from egg to harvest.

More markers nearby

• James S. Gillett — steps away
• Thomas Pratt — steps away
• James Jackson Beeman — steps away
• Garrison Greenwood — steps away