Historical Marker
Wartime Home Industry
Longview, Gregg County · Texas
Erected 1965
The Gregg County TXGenWeb cemetery listing for the Sparkman-Redick Cemetery gives Joseph Mark Sparkman's birth as January 30, 1828, and his death as May 22, 1911. It records his 1861 marriage in Georgia to Harriet Caroline, who died in 1915, and notes that he was a registered voter in Panola County in 1867. The listing includes Uncle Ben, described as an enslaved man who worked in the shoe factory, with no surname or dates. The cemetery itself disappeared in the 1970s under construction, and the whereabouts of its markers are unknown.
What the plaque says
Wartime Home Industry At this site, 1861-65, settler Joseph M. sparkman manufactured shoes for the Confederate Army. A victim of arthritis, he lay on his cot and ran the shop, while "Uncle Ben," a skilled slave shoemaker who had come with him from Georgia, supervised and taught young boys and old men who made the shoes. Both Joseph M. Sparkman and "Uncle Ben" are buried in the family plot on the estate, near here. Their work during the Civil War typifies the gallant spirit of volunteers who mined salt, made cloth and clothing, hunted the woods for medicinal herbs. (1965)
Where it stands
32.53601, -94.79006 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- East Texas Oil Museum — 12 miA Kilgore College museum that rebuilds the 1930s oil boom in a full-scale Boomtown with a general store, drugstore and newspaper office, plus dioramas, films and antiques given by East Texans.
- New London Museum and Cenotaph — 22 miA volunteer-run museum beside the pink granite cenotaph for the March 1937 school gas explosion, holding a model of the school, a blackboard from that day and an odorizer device.
- Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 24 miMaplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
- Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 25 miThe only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.