42nd Reunion of Hood's Texas Brigade
Temple, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Honored the late General John B. Hood, for whom Fort Hood was named. Meetings were in First Baptist Church. Transportation from Carnegie Library (convention headquarters) was by one of the first auto parades in Temple. J.W. Stevens, Chaplain, Hood's original brigade, conducted the annual memorial ceremony. Other speakers included Dr. T.A. Pope, of Cameron, and Hon. W.B. Lane, State Comptroller. Convention ended with rousing rendition of Confederate war song, "Dixie". This association, founded in 1872, held reunions until 1934. (1967)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the decades after Appomattox, Confederate veterans gathered to keep the memory of their service alive, and in 1906 the survivors of Hood's Texas Brigade held their 42nd reunion in Temple. The men met at the First Baptist Church, rode in one of Temple's first automobile parades, heard a memorial ceremony led by the brigade's original chaplain, and closed with a rousing chorus of 'Dixie.' Founded in 1872, the veterans' association held reunions until 1934.
Why it matters
The Hood's Texas Brigade reunions capture the long afterlife of the Civil War in Southern memory, when aging soldiers built a culture of commemoration that shaped how the Lost Cause was remembered for generations.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · General John B. Hood
- · J.W. Stevens
Related events
- · Hood's Texas Brigade reunion
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Raleigh Richardson White, Sr.
Temple, TX
Born to a wealthy Missouri plantation family, Raleigh R. White defied his father to join the Confederate army at 21, serving under Nathan Bedford Forrest and rising to acting colonel. A religious conversion after the war redirected his life: ordained a Baptist minister in 1873, he moved his large family to Texas in 1882 and became an influential itinerant preacher, active in seminaries, missions, and Baptist work among African Americans. His son later founded the Temple hospital that grew into Scott & White.
Cyrus Maxwell Campbell
Temple, TX
Raised near Travis in Austin County, Cyrus Maxwell Campbell enlisted in the Confederate army at 21 and rose to captain in the 16th Texas Infantry. After the war he farmed with the help of Freedmen, then turned to lumber, opening Campbell & Lovitt Lumber in Temple in 1888 and expanding across Central Texas until the Depression closed the family enterprise in the 1930s.
Seven Star Cemetery
Temple, TX
Established in the 1860s along the MKT rail line near Temple, this burial ground has gone by many names but is remembered today as Seven Star Cemetery — a reference to the North Star and the constellation traditions said to have guided people escaping slavery toward freedom. Though fewer than 100 of its roughly 500 graves keep their original markers, those buried here include formerly enslaved people and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The local Juneteenth Association tends the site.
A Memorial to Civil War Education in Texas
Belton, TX
This memorial recalls what the Civil War did to Texas schooling. Baylor University — including the 'Female Department' that became Mary Hardin-Baylor — had run at Independence for fifteen years when war came in 1861, and it suffered along with education statewide: state school funds stopped, many of the 1860's 2,416 college students marched off as soldiers, and numerous of Texas's 25 colleges closed. In the classrooms that remained, the old, the disabled, and women taught children who wrote on slates or in smoothed sand for want of paper.