City of Cleveland
Cleveland, Liberty County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The town of Cleveland traces its beginnings to 1878, when local attorney and politician Charles Lander Cleveland (1824-1892) deeded land to the Houston East and West Texas Railroad, stipulating the building of a railway depot and the establishment of a town to be named Cleveland. By 1879 the settlement boasted a sawmill, two boarding houses, railroad interests, and a number of homes. Churches and schools were established and the town continued to grow, with an economy based on timber and railroad industries. The city was officially incorporated in 1935. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Cleveland owes its start to 1878, when attorney and politician Charles Lander Cleveland deeded land to the Houston East and West Texas Railroad on the condition that a depot rise and a town bearing his name take root. Within a year the settlement had a sawmill, boarding houses, and homes, and its economy leaned on timber and the railroad for decades. The city was formally incorporated in 1935.
Why it matters
The town is a textbook example of how railroads conjured entire communities into being across late nineteenth-century Texas, trading land for depots and depots for prosperity.
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Related people
- · Charles Lander Cleveland
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Wells' Store
Cleveland, TX
Built about 1875 by D. W. Proctor & Company and later run by L. L. Wells, this general mercantile store stood on the Old Nacogdoches-Lynchburg Trail, a busy 19th-century thoroughfare. It replaced an earlier store on the same spot and became the hub of the Tarkington's Prairie community, where neighbors traded goods and news. Over time it doubled as post office, wagon stop, credit house, and polling place.
Town of Shepherd
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Shepherd grew from riverboat roots along the Trinity, where Old Drew's Landing shipped out cotton and tobacco for a scattering of pioneer settlements. When the Houston East & West Texas Railroad pushed through in the late 1870s, investor Benjamin A. Shepherd platted a townsite in 1875 and gave it his name, and a post office, physician, hotel, and church soon followed. Once a hub of the East Texas lumber industry, it settled into life as a steady market town of the piney woods.
New Caney
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Permanent settlement of the New Caney area began in the 1860s, first taking the name Presswood for a pioneer cattle-raising family, soon joined by the farming and cotton-ginning Robinsons. When the Houston, East and West Texas Railway arrived in the 1870s, the community became a livestock shipping point known as Caney Station, and in 1882 a new post office adopted the name New Caney. As East Texas timber boomed, the town shipped out mining props cut to shore up tunnel walls.
The Isaac Conroe Property
Conroe, TX
A New Jersey native and Union Army veteran of the Civil War, Isaac Conroe moved to Southeast Texas in 1866 and in 1878 built a sawmill whose lumber business gave rise to the town of Conroe, connected by a tram line to the International and Great Northern Railroad. He became the settlement's first postmaster and built this residence in 1885. From 1889 to 1891 it served as the temporary Montgomery County courthouse until a permanent one was completed, and his son William later expanded the home.