CCC Camp Site
Madisonville, Madison County, Texas
Marker Inscription
A part of the national Civilian Conservation Corps program of the New Deal era, Camp Sam Houston in Madisonville was a soil conservation camp. Begun in July 1935 and occupied by workers one month later, the camp provided jobs for 196 men. Members of the camp worked with area farmers and ranchers, demonstrating techniques of soil erosion control and pasture management. Covering a radius of 21 miles, CCC improvement projects included all of Madison County, as well as portions of Grimes, Leon, and Walker Counties. The camp was closed in 1941.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Camp Sam Houston, opened near Madisonville in 1935, was a soil-conservation unit of the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, giving work to 196 men in the depths of the Great Depression. Its members ranged across Madison and neighboring counties, teaching farmers and ranchers erosion control and pasture management within a 21-mile radius. The camp closed in 1941 as the nation turned toward war.
Why it matters
CCC camps like this one show how the New Deal put a generation of unemployed men to work while reshaping American land stewardship, leaving a legacy in the soil itself.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Civilian Conservation Corps
- · New Deal
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jubal Richard Parten
Madisonville, TX
Born in Madisonville in 1896, Jubal Richard "J.R." Parten rose from University of Texas law student and World War I army major to become a pioneering figure in the American oil industry, co-founding Woodley Petroleum in 1919. He wielded influence far beyond the oilfield, serving on the UT Board of Regents and directing petroleum logistics for the war effort during World War II, even taking part in the postwar Potsdam negotiations. Truman later tapped him again to organize petroleum administration during the Korean War.
Allphin Cemetery
Elwood, TX
Ransom Allphin came from Illinois to Texas with his parents in 1829 and secured this land through an 1835 Mexican land grant, farming and running a grist mill on the frontier. In 1854, while digging a well, he struck clay and soapstone, abandoned the shaft, and donated five acres as a community burial ground—becoming its first grave that same year. Later burials, many from the 1918 influenza epidemic, layer generations of local history into the plot.
Eastham Prison Farm
Lovelady, TX
The Eastham family bought a nearly 13,000-acre plantation in Houston County in 1891 and soon leased it to the Texas prison system for share-farming, the landowner supplying tools and mules while convict labor worked the fields. The state bought the land outright in 1915 and made Eastham a hard-labor institution, building an early maximum-security unit in 1919 and using inmate labor to carve roads and a Trinity River ferry crossing. Decades later, penologist O. B. Ellis brought reforms — a library, chapel, and education program — that eased the farm's grim reputation.
Site of Old Town and Post Office of Weldon
Weldon, TX
The settlement began around William Morrow's 1850 cotton gin and gained a post office renamed Weldon in 1869 for pioneer merchant Weldon Jones Murchison. Cotton and timber drove the local economy, with logs hauled by tram road to distant mills by 1900. When the Beaumont & Great Northern Railway arrived in 1911, the whole town picked up and moved south to meet the tracks, prospering despite ruinous fires before its post office finally closed in 1976.