"Cherry Hill" Home of Thomas N. Waul
Neylandville, Hunt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
1813-1903 Native South Carolinian, Texas plantation owner and lawyer, member first Confederate Congress, Colonel commanding Waul's Texas Legion at Vicksburg, upon exchange in 1863 appointed Brigadier-General, led his brigade in battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in Louisiana, and Battle of Jenkins' Ferry in Arkansas. Member Texas first Reconstruction convention. A memorial to Texans who served in the Confederacy. Erected by the State of Texas 1963
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This marker honors Thomas N. Waul (1813–1903), a South Carolina–born Texas planter and lawyer who sat in the first Confederate Congress before taking the field. He raised and commanded Waul's Texas Legion, was captured at Vicksburg, and after exchange was made a brigadier general, leading his brigade at Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, and Jenkins' Ferry, then serving in Texas's first Reconstruction convention. The State of Texas erected the memorial in 1963 to Texans who served the Confederacy.
Why it matters
Waul's career links the battlefields of the Civil War's Trans-Mississippi theater to the wrenching politics of Reconstruction that followed defeat.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This marker looks back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Texas was a young state stitched into a nation about to tear itself apart. Thomas N. Waul was born in South Carolina in 1813 and made his life in Texas as a planter and lawyer — a path that placed him squarely among the men who would lead the South into secession and war.
The world he moved in was the antebellum plantation South, an economy and social order built on slavery, and Texas was its western frontier. When the Southern states left the Union in 1860 and 1861, they first gathered in a provisional Confederate congress to build a new government from scratch, and Waul was among those first lawmakers before he ever put on a uniform.
His war would be fought largely in the Trans-Mississippi — the vast theater west of the great river, often overshadowed in memory by the campaigns in Virginia and around the Mississippi itself, but decisive to the fate of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
People & events
Waul's story arcs from the legislative chamber to the battlefield and back to the convention hall. Having helped shape the Confederacy's first government, he raised and led Waul's Texas Legion and took it east to the defense of Vicksburg, the fortress city whose fall would split the Confederacy in two. When Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, its defenders — Waul among them — passed into Union hands as prisoners.
Exchanged later that year, he was promoted to brigadier general and returned to the field in the Trans-Mississippi. In the spring of 1864 his brigade fought at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in Louisiana, the battles that turned back the Union's Red River Campaign, and then at Jenkins' Ferry in Arkansas at the end of April, part of the fighting that blunted the federal Camden Expedition.
When the war ended, Waul's public life did not. He sat in the first Texas convention of Reconstruction, joining the fraught work of writing the defeated South back into the Union. He lived until 1903, long enough to see the world of his youth swept away and the memory of the war begin to harden into monument.
Its place in the American story
Waul's career is a thread connecting the Civil War's western battlefields to the long, difficult politics that followed. The surrender at Vicksburg was one of the war's true hinges, and the Trans-Mississippi campaigns he fought in decided whether federal forces could pry apart the Confederate West. His later seat in the Reconstruction convention places him at the other end of the same national trauma — among the men who had to rebuild civil government atop defeat.
But this marker is honest only if you read its own date. It was erected by the State of Texas in 1963 and calls itself, in plain words, a memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy. It is therefore as much an artifact of the mid-twentieth century as of the 1860s — one of many Confederate memorials placed during the Civil War Centennial, a century after the fighting.
That double nature is the deeper significance. The marker records real service in real battles, and it also records how a later generation chose to remember that service. Both readings are part of the American story, and a thoughtful visitor can hold them at the same time: the events of the 1860s, and the act of commemoration in 1963.
If you visit
You are visiting a memorial, so come prepared to read as much as to look. The marker names a man, a legion, and a string of battles fought far from this quiet Hunt County spot — Vicksburg in Mississippi, Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in Louisiana, Jenkins' Ferry in Arkansas — and part of the experience is the distance between the peaceful ground here and the violence the words describe.
Take a moment with the marker's own closing lines and its 1963 date. Standing there, you are looking at two layers of history at once: the life of a nineteenth-century soldier and lawmaker, and the mid-twentieth-century decision to memorialize him. Good historical travel often means noticing who put a marker up, and when, and why.
It fits naturally into a slow drive through the small towns of Northeast Texas, where markers like this one dot the landscape. Read it, consider it, and let it prompt the larger questions about the war and its long aftermath — that is exactly the kind of reflection a roadside memorial is best at inviting.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Thomas N. Waul
Related events
- · Siege of Vicksburg
- · Battle of Mansfield
- · Battle of Pleasant Hill
- · Battle of Jenkins' Ferry
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Benjamin D. Martin
Greenville, TX
Benjamin D. Martin came to Hunt County from Virginia in the 1850s and, during the Civil War, organized the Texas Sharpshooters known as "Ben Martin's Company." After the war he became Greenville's first mayor in 1873, helped draft the Texas Constitution of 1875, and served in the state senate. His public life spanned the wrenching passage from Confederacy to Reconstruction-era Texas.
Greenville
Greenville, TX
Created in 1846, Hunt County set its seat at a spot donated by surveyor McQuinney Howell Wright and named it Greenville for Texas independence veteran Thomas J. Green. Unusually for north central Texas, the county voted for secession, and Greenville endured hardship, violence, and federal occupation through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The arrival of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad in 1880 transformed the town into a cotton-shipping powerhouse, complete with banks, streetcars, and Texas's first municipally owned electric utility.
Stewart Cemetery
Commerce, TX
John and Ellen Stewart settled here about 1843, and John is credited with building the first pioneer home in eastern Hunt County during the Republic of Texas era. The family later sold land to the founder of nearby Commerce. The earliest legible marker is a child's grave from 1863, and the cemetery holds Confederate veterans — including the Stewart sons — as well as victims of an early-1900s epidemic.
William Lane
Greenville, TX
William Lane was born in 1843 near present Wolfe City, when Hunt County lay within the independent Republic of Texas and Anglo-American families were only beginning to settle its blackland prairies. Remembered as the first Anglo-American child born in the county, he was the son of one of the men who helped organize it. Like many young Texans of his generation, he served in the Confederate army during the Civil War before settling into a long life in the Vansickle community.