Col. Homer Garrison, Jr.
Palestine, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Born in Kickapoo (Anderson Co.) in 1901, Homer Garrison was the son of Mattie (Milam) and Homer Garrison, Sr. The family moved to Angelina County, where Homer, Sr. served as district clerk. Homer, Jr. graduated from Lufkin High School and worked for his father. Against his father’s advice, he took his first law enforcement job at age 19, as Angelina County deputy sheriff. In 1929, he became the state license and weight inspector for the Texas Highway Department. When the Texas Highway Patrol organized in 1930, Homer, Jr. was one of the first thirty patrolmen. In 1935, the Texas Legislature created the Department of Public Safety (DPS), combining the Highway Patrol with the Texas Rangers, the state’s oldest law enforcement group. Garrison was the first assistant director and developed training for DPS officers. Three years later, Col. Garrison became DPS director and chief of the Texas Rangers. Under his leadership, the DPS grew to more than 3,400 employees and major programs developed, including crime control, police training and traffic supervision, driver licensing, vehicle inspection, safety education, and defense and disaster service. In his thirty years as head of the state law enforcement agency, federal and state agencies sought Garrison’s expertise and experience. He also served as head of state defense and disaster relief efforts. Garrison helped secure a headquarters building and museum for the Texas Rangers in Waco. At the groundbreaking, he gave what was to be his last speech, remarking of the Rangers, “They are men who cannot be stampeded;” these words are at the base of the museum’s Texas Ranger statue. Garrison died in 1968. He and his wife Mary Nell (Kilgo) are buried at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin. 175 Years of Texas Independence * 1836-2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in Anderson County in 1901, Homer Garrison, Jr. took his first lawman's job at nineteen as a deputy sheriff, against his father's advice. He was among the first thirty Texas Highway Patrol troopers in 1930 and, when the Department of Public Safety was created in 1935 by merging the patrol with the Texas Rangers, rose to become its director and chief of the Rangers in 1938. Over thirty years he built the agency to more than 3,400 employees and pioneered training, licensing, and safety programs.
Why it matters
Garrison modernized Texas law enforcement, transforming the frontier-era Rangers and a young highway patrol into a professional statewide agency whose model influenced departments nationwide.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Homer Garrison, Jr., came of age in the East Texas of the early twentieth century, born in the Anderson County community of Kickapoo in 1901 and raised in a public-minded family — his father served as a district clerk after the family moved to Angelina County. It was a world still close to its frontier past but rushing headlong into the automobile age, and that collision would define his career.
The arrival of the car changed everything about public safety. Roads that had carried wagons now carried fast-moving vehicles across county and state lines, and the old patchwork of local sheriffs and constables was never designed for it. States across the country began building highway patrols and modern, professional police agencies in response.
Texas layered that new need onto one of the oldest law enforcement traditions in the country. The Texas Rangers, with roots deep in the era of Anglo-American settlement and the Republic, were the state's oldest such body — and the challenge of Garrison's generation was to fuse that storied frontier heritage with the demands of a modern, motorized, statewide agency.
People & events
Garrison graduated from Lufkin High School and worked for his father before making a choice that set his course — against his father's advice, he took his first law enforcement job at nineteen as an Angelina County deputy sheriff. In 1929 he became a state license and weight inspector for the Texas Highway Department, and when the Texas Highway Patrol was organized in 1930, he was one of its first thirty patrolmen.
The pivotal moment came in 1935, when the Texas Legislature created the Department of Public Safety, combining the Highway Patrol with the Texas Rangers. Garrison served as its first assistant director and built the training programs for its officers; three years later he became DPS director and chief of the Texas Rangers, posts he would hold for thirty years. Under his leadership the department grew to more than 3,400 employees and pioneered programs in crime control, police training, traffic supervision, driver licensing, vehicle inspection, safety education, and disaster response.
He left a fitting final mark. Garrison helped secure a headquarters and museum for the Texas Rangers in Waco, and at its groundbreaking he gave what would be his last speech, saying of the Rangers, "They are men who cannot be stampeded" — words now set at the base of the museum's Texas Ranger statue. He died in 1968 and is buried, with his wife Mary Nell, at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
Its place in the American story
Garrison's career traces one of the defining transformations of twentieth-century American government: the professionalization of law enforcement. In his lifetime, policing moved from something largely local and improvised toward trained, specialized, statewide institutions with standards, communications, and formal education — and he was among the architects of that shift in Texas.
His particular achievement was to modernize without erasing. By welding the Highway Patrol to the legendary Texas Rangers under a single department, he carried a frontier-era institution into the machine age, preserving its identity while equipping it with the tools of a modern agency. That model of a unified state public-safety department influenced how other states thought about the problem.
And in helping to build the Rangers' museum and headquarters, Garrison ensured that the heritage would be honored as well as reformed — that the memory of the old Rangers would be kept even as their institution was remade for a new century. His story is a distinctly American blend of frontier legend and modern administration.
If you visit
This memorial in Palestine invites you to reckon with a life rather than a single event, so read the marker as a full arc — from a teenager who defied his father to take a deputy's badge, to the colonel who led a statewide agency of thousands for three decades. It is a career that reads like the history of modern policing in miniature.
Carry his last words with you. "They are men who cannot be stampeded" is the kind of line that captures a whole ethos in a phrase, and knowing it is carved at the base of a statue elsewhere gives even this quiet spot a sense of connection to the larger legacy he built.
For a road trip through East Texas, Garrison makes a compelling thread to follow — a local son whose reach extended across the entire state. Stand at the memorial and consider how a boy from this corner of Anderson County ended up shaping the safety of Texas roads and the future of its most famous lawmen.
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
- · Homer Garrison, Jr.
Related events
- · Creation of the Texas Department of Public Safety, 1935
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Purvey Lee (P.L.) Chism
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Born in Alabama in 1893, Purvey Lee Chism served with the 127th Field Artillery in England and France during World War I before devoting his life to education. He taught and led rural schools in Lamar County, earned a master's degree from Texas A&M, and in 1940 moved to Palestine as a deputy state superintendent overseeing a growing cluster of counties. As Anderson County's school supervisor until 1963, he visited classrooms daily, shaping curriculum and mentoring teachers and students alike.
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