Colonel Richard B. Hubbard
Tyler, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(Star and Wreath) (1832-1901) School named for Texas Confederate. Georgia-born, came to Texas 1853. Tyler lawyer, politician. State legislator. Raised 5th Tex. Inf. Bn., merged 1862 in Hubbard's Regt., 22nd Tex. Inf. In 1863 campaign to stop split of South on the Mississippi River, unit helped relieve Vicksburg Siege. Interrupted supplies for Federals, gave military support to drovers pushing cattle across river to Confederates. Regt. fought in 1864 Red River campaign to stop invasion Texas. Governor R. B. Hubbard.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Georgia-born Richard B. Hubbard came to Texas in 1853 and built a career as a Tyler lawyer, legislator, and eventually governor. During the Civil War he raised the 5th Texas Infantry Battalion, which merged into his own regiment, the 22nd Texas Infantry, and served in the 1863 campaign around the Vicksburg siege and the 1864 Red River campaign that turned back a Federal invasion of Texas. A local school was later named in his honor.
Why it matters
Hubbard's wartime and political career traces the trajectory of the Confederate officer class that dominated Texas public life for a generation after the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The 1860s tore through Texas as they tore through the rest of the country. Though far from the war's largest battlefields, Texas sent tens of thousands of men to Confederate service and became a vital supply reservoir for the South. Its cattle, cotton, and access to Mexican trade routes made the state matter to a Confederacy increasingly cut off from the outside world.
Tyler, in East Texas, was part of that effort. The region's lawyers and politicians raised regiments and led them into the field, and Tyler itself became a significant Confederate site during the war. This was a society mobilizing for a conflict that would reshape it permanently.
The man remembered here embodied that generation. Born in Georgia in 1832 and arriving in Texas in 1853, he was still young when the war came, already established as a lawyer and rising in politics. His life would run from the antebellum frontier through the war and into the long era that followed.
People & events
Richard B. Hubbard built his early reputation in Tyler as a lawyer and served in the state legislature before the war. When the fighting began, he raised the 5th Texas Infantry Battalion, a unit that in 1862 merged into a larger regiment he would lead — the 22nd Texas Infantry.
In 1863 his regiment took part in the struggle over the Mississippi River, the campaign to keep the Confederacy from being split in two along that great waterway. The marker recalls the unit working to relieve the pressure on besieged Vicksburg and to disrupt Federal supplies, while helping cover the cattle being driven across the river to feed Confederate armies — a reminder that Texas beef was a weapon of war in its own right.
The next year brought the Red River Campaign of 1864, a Union push aimed at Texas that Confederate forces turned back. Hubbard's regiment fought in that defense. He survived the war, and in time rose to become governor of Texas — the title the marker gives him. A school was later named in his honor, which is why this memorial stands.
Its place in the American story
Hubbard's life traces a path walked by a whole class of men after the Civil War: former Confederate officers who returned home and dominated Southern public life for a generation. The soldier of the 1860s became the governor of the 1870s, and his story maps the way military service translated into political authority across the postwar South.
The campaigns named on the marker also point to the larger strategy of the war. Control of the Mississippi River was one of the Union's central war aims, because splitting the Confederacy along it would sever the western states — including Texas — from the rest. The 1864 thrust toward Texas shows the state was not merely a distant supplier but an actual target.
The marker itself is a historical document of a later era. Erected to honor a Confederate figure and name a school for him, it belongs to the long period when the South memorialized its war leaders in stone. Reading it today means seeing both the man's nineteenth-century career and the twentieth-century impulse to commemorate it.
If you visit
This is a marker to read closely and slowly. Notice the Star and Wreath emblem at its head, a common motif on Texas Confederate memorials, and let the compressed inscription unfold — it packs an entire life, from a Georgia birth to a Texas governorship, into a few dense lines.
Think about the layers of time you are standing in. There is the 1830s frontier the man was born into, the war years the text recounts, and the later moment when a community chose to name a school for him and set this marker down. A good historical marker is always at least two stories: the past it describes and the era that chose to remember it.
Take it in as part of Tyler's wider historical landscape. East Texas carries deep marks from the Civil War era, and this quiet roadside text is one thread in that larger fabric — best appreciated with a little time to consider both what it says and why it was raised.
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
- · Richard B. Hubbard
Related events
- · Siege of Vicksburg
- · Red River Campaign
Themes & tags
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