Anderson County in the Civil War
Palestine, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
After the creation of Anderson County in 1846, most settlers came from Southern states, shaping the county's destiny in the Civil War. When Texas became the seventh state to secede from the Union on March 2, 1861, the county vote, 870 to 15, was overwhelmingly in favor of secession. Notable citizens John H. Reagan, A.T. Rainey, S.G. Stewart and T.J. Word were delegates to the Secession Convention in Austin, and Rainey and Reagan signed the Texas Ordinance of Secession. Before the vote, Governor Sam Houston spoke against secession on the steps of the Osceola Hotel in Palestine. More than 1,100 Anderson countians helped form twelve infantry and cavalry companies for the Confederate army, including seven companies entirely of local men. More than 300 died in the war and are buried at famed battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. Those on the home front contributed greatly to the war effort. Factories near Mound Prairie and Plenitude produced flour, cloth, rifles, ammunition, tin goods, shoes, harnesses, bridles and other leather goods. The salt works west of Palestine filled a need for food and meat preservation. Ladies knitted socks and blankets and sewed shirts and trousers bound for the war front. The Hunter Hotel served as a makeshift hospital, hosting men of the 10th Texas Infantry in May 1862; nine of them ultimately succumbed to their wounds and illnesses and were buried in the Old City Cemetery. Several citizens served leading roles in the Confederacy, including Reagan, who was postmaster general and treasury secretary of the government at Richmond. He and Confederate president Jefferson Davis were captured together at the close of the war. Anderson County is the final resting place of more than 500 veterans from all across the South, and the present home of thousands of descendants of those veterans. (2012)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settled largely by families from the Deep South, Anderson County voted overwhelmingly—870 to 15—for secession in 1861, even as Governor Sam Houston pleaded against it on the steps of Palestine's Osceola Hotel. More than 1,100 local men filled a dozen Confederate companies, over 300 dying on battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. On the home front, factories and salt works supplied the war effort while a hotel served as a makeshift hospital; among the county's leaders was John H. Reagan, the Confederacy's postmaster general.
Why it matters
The marker shows how a single Texas county mobilized wholly for the Confederacy—in votes, soldiers, and industry—illustrating the deep Southern loyalties that carried Texas into the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Anderson County was created in 1846, the year after Texas joined the Union, and the people who came to settle it carried the culture — and the economy — of the Deep South with them. They brought cotton, they brought the plantation system, and with it they brought slavery. By the time the sectional crisis reached its breaking point, the county's loyalties were already set by the places its families had come from.
The nation in 1861 was splitting along exactly these lines. State after Southern state was leaving the Union, and Texas faced the same wrenching choice. In a formal vote the county came down overwhelmingly for secession, 870 to 15 — a margin that leaves little doubt about where the community stood.
But the choice was not unanimous at the top. Before the vote, Governor Sam Houston — the towering figure of Texas independence — stood on the steps of the Osceola Hotel in Palestine and spoke against leaving the Union. It was a courageous, losing stand, and it framed the county's decision as a deliberate one, made against the warning of its most famous statesman.
People & events
Texas became the seventh state to secede on March 2, 1861 — a date already sacred to Texans as their Independence Day. Anderson County sent notable citizens as delegates to the Secession Convention in Austin, among them John H. Reagan and A.T. Rainey, both of whom signed the Texas Ordinance of Secession.
What followed was total. More than eleven hundred local men formed twelve infantry and cavalry companies for the Confederate army, seven of them made up entirely of Anderson County men. More than three hundred never came home; they lie in battlefield graves scattered from New Mexico to Pennsylvania — the far western and eastern edges of a war that swallowed a generation.
The home front worked just as hard. Factories near Mound Prairie and Plenitude turned out flour, cloth, rifles, ammunition, shoes and leather goods; a salt works west of Palestine preserved the meat that fed soldiers; and women knitted and sewed for the front. The Hunter Hotel became a makeshift hospital, where nine men of the 10th Texas Infantry died in the spring of 1862 and were buried in the Old City Cemetery. Above them all stood Reagan, who served the Confederate government at Richmond as postmaster general and, at the end, was captured alongside President Jefferson Davis.
Its place in the American story
It is worth being plain about why this happened, because the marker's own numbers make the stakes unmistakable. Texas seceded to preserve slavery — the state said so itself in its declaration of the causes of secession — and Anderson County's lopsided vote reflected a community whose economy and social order were built on that institution. To understand the Civil War honestly is to keep that cause in view.
What this one county shows is how completely a place could pour itself into that cause. Votes, delegates, soldiers, factories, salt, hospital beds, knitted socks — the whole machinery of a community bent toward the war. Multiply Anderson County by the hundreds of counties like it across the South and you begin to grasp why the conflict was so vast, so long, and so terrible in its cost.
And the cost is the part that outlasts the politics. More than three hundred local dead, buried far from home, and more than five hundred veterans from across the South laid to rest here in the end. Behind every statistic on this marker is a family that sent someone away and, often, never got him back.
If you visit
Palestine wears its Civil War history quietly, in cemeteries and old buildings rather than grand monuments, and that is part of what makes a visit here feel intimate. The marker asks you to read the ordinary streets of an East Texas town as a former staging ground for a war effort — to imagine the factories, the salt works, and the hotel that became a hospital.
The Old City Cemetery is the place to let the numbers become real. This is where nine soldiers of the 10th Texas Infantry were buried after dying of their wounds and illnesses, and the county holds the graves of hundreds more veterans. Standing among them, the marker's tally of the dead stops being an abstraction.
Come with the whole story in mind. This was a community that mobilized completely for a cause rooted in slavery, that heard Sam Houston warn against it and chose otherwise, and that paid for the choice in sons who lie in distant graves. Let the place hold all of that at once — pride, loss, and hard truth together.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · John H. Reagan
- · Sam Houston
- · Jefferson Davis
Related events
- · Texas Ordinance of Secession, 1861
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John H. Reagan
Palestine, TX
Born in Tennessee in 1818, John Henninger Reagan came to Texas, fought in the Cherokee War, and built a career in law and politics that carried him to the U.S. Congress by 1857. When war came he resigned over states' rights and served as postmaster general of the Confederacy, was captured and imprisoned, then returned to Texas and rebuilt his life. His greatest legacy came afterward: as congressman and senator he led the fight that produced the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, then became the first chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, pioneering government regulation of the railroads.
Palestine Salt Works C. S. A.
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During the Civil War salt was a strategic necessity—for preserving meat and feeding armies—and this works labored to supply the Confederacy at a fixed price, though desperate private buyers often paid far more. Enslaved workers pumped brine from a line of wells through hollowed-gum-log pipelines to great iron kettles, where it was slowly boiled down into salt.
John H. Reagan
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Born in Tennessee in 1818, John Henninger Reagan rose through Texas public life as a judge and congressman before resigning his seat in 1861 to serve as postmaster general of the Confederacy. Captured and imprisoned after the war, he returned to farm near Palestine and re-entered national politics, where he led the fight for the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act that first brought railroad monopolies under federal regulation. He capped his career as the first chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.
McClure-McReynolds-Fowler Home
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Judge Alexander E. McClure, a Tennessee lawyer who came to Texas in 1840, built this Palestine home in 1849 and served as Anderson County's first district clerk. In 1884 it passed to Confederate veteran Z. A. McReynolds, who had survived the sieges of Vicksburg and Atlanta and went on to hold nearly every county office. It later sheltered his daughter and her husband, Colonel Godfrey Fowler, a soldier of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and World War I.