Wilbur Cherry

Cherry did not quite buy the Galveston News. The Handbook of Texas says that in June 1843 he and Michael Cronican leased the press equipment from the printer Samuel Bangs and began a semiweekly. In late 1844 Cherry and Benjamin Neal, then the owners, hired Willard Richardson as editor, and he became sole owner in 1845. Richardson made the paper a leading Texas voice and used it to defend slavery, urge reopening the slave trade, and demand secession after Lincoln's election. Cherry's name survives on a 1936 stone, and the paper outlasted him by more than a century.

What the plaque says

Wilbur Cherry Served in the Texas army, 1836. Purchased the "Galveston News" 1843. Born in New Haven, N. Y. January 4, 1820; died June 19, 1873. His wife Catherine Crosby French Cherry born in Sligo, Ireland, February 22, 1826; died February 15, 1909.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Moody Mansion — 1.0 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 1.2 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.
• The Strand — 1.4 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm — 1.5 mi
  The concrete wall along the Gulf that Galveston built after the hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people in a city of 38,000.

More markers nearby

• Bernard Moore Temple — steps away
• Major John M. Allen — steps away
• Captain William S. Fisher — steps away
• Warren D. C. Hall — steps away