Alfred Madison Hightower

🏛️The era

In the late 1850s, the area around Smithfield in north Texas was still frontier country. New settlers, many from the Upper South and the Midwest, were arriving to farm and raise cattle on the prairies near the small settlement that would one day grow into Fort Worth.

In those same years the national argument over slavery reached its crisis. When Texas voted on secession in 1861, the state as a whole voted heavily to leave the Union, but the vote was not unanimous. Some north Texas counties and many individual Texans opposed it, especially newcomers from free states and people with ties to the North.

Once war came, people who had argued against secession still had to decide what to do. Many, like Hightower, ended up fighting for the side they had argued against, out of loyalty to their neighbors, their new home, or the state they now lived in.

👥People & events

Alfred Madison Hightower came to Smithfield from Illinois with his family in 1858 and became a rancher. Coming from a free state, he was the kind of settler who might well have had doubts about leaving the Union, and when the secession debate began he spoke against it.

When war actually broke out, he sided with the South. He served as a mounted rifleman in the Confederate Army, a soldier who rode to battle but often fought on foot with a rifle, and he took part in many engagements. One of them was the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern, also called Pea Ridge, fought in northwest Arkansas in March 1862.

Pea Ridge was one of the largest battles fought west of the Mississippi. It ended in a Union victory, and historians generally agree it helped keep Missouri under Union control. For soldiers like Hightower it meant cold, hard fighting far from home.

After the war he moved to Kansas for a while in the 1870s. But north Texas drew him back. In 1880 he returned and went on ranching here until his death. Nearby Hightower Street still carries his name.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Hightower's story complicates the simple picture of a solidly united Confederacy. All across the South, and especially on the frontier and in border regions, there were people who opposed secession and then served anyway. Their choices show the hard pull between principle, community loyalty and survival when war forced everyone to pick a side.

His service at Pea Ridge connects this quiet corner of Tarrant County to the fight for the Trans-Mississippi West. That theater is often overlooked next to the famous battles in the East, but it decided whether Missouri and its key river routes would stay in Union hands.

His moves, from Illinois to Texas, to Kansas, and back to Texas, also show how restless Americans were in the nineteenth century. Families kept moving west in search of land and opportunity, carrying their loyalties, and sometimes their doubts, with them.

🧭If you visit

Today Smithfield's old landscape lies inside North Richland Hills, part of the busy Dallas–Fort Worth area. It takes some imagination to picture open ranch land where suburban streets now run, and that contrast is part of what makes the marker worth a stop.

Look for Hightower Street nearby, a small daily reminder of a rancher whose life spanned the frontier, the Civil War and the growth of north Texas. Markers like this one keep the old Smithfield community from disappearing into the modern map.

If you're exploring Civil War or frontier history around Fort Worth, this is an easy, quick stop. It also pairs well with a longer trip to Pea Ridge National Military Park in northwest Arkansas, where you can walk the ground where Hightower fought.