County Named for Texas Confederate Colonel David B. Culberson

🏛️The era

David B. Culberson's story begins in the tense decade before the Civil War. Like many Southerners in the 1850s, he moved west, leaving Georgia for Texas in 1856, when the state was still young in the Union and settlement was spreading fast across its eastern and central counties.

When secession came in 1861, Texans were more divided than people often remember. Most voted to leave the Union, but a real minority opposed it, some on principle and some because they expected disaster. Culberson was one of the opponents. Still, once Texas joined the Confederacy, many who had argued against secession chose to serve their state, and he was among them.

The war did not stay on distant battlefields for Texas. With so many men gone east, the state's long western and northern frontier was left thinly defended. The upheaval of the war reached into Indian Territory and the Southern Plains too, bringing a period of raiding and insecurity that the marker's reverse side describes.

👥People & events

Although he had opposed secession, Culberson helped raise the 18th Texas Infantry and entered Confederate service as its lieutenant colonel. In 1862 he became its commanding colonel. The regiment served in the Vicksburg area, the Mississippi River stronghold that both sides saw as essential for controlling the river and the West.

He did not stay in the field long. Broken health forced him to resign his command in the winter of 1862-63. Illness disabled or killed huge numbers of Civil War soldiers, and his story is a reminder that disease was as dangerous to a career as enemy fire.

His service continued in another role. From 1863 to 1864 he was Adjutant and Inspector General of Texas, responsible for defending the frontier against Union invasion from outside and raids along the state's western and northern edges. It was a difficult assignment with too few men, weak supplies, and a frontier hundreds of miles long.

The reverse of the marker gives the wider picture. War disrupted the Native nations of Kansas and Indian Territory. Most Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles sided with the South and others with the North, while the Comanches and their Kiowa allies mostly stayed out of the conflict and raided the frontier. Apaches and Kickapoos did the same from Mexico. For these tribes the war was also a fight over homelands that settlers had been taking, so the raids that terrified Texas families belonged to a longer struggle. After the war Culberson had a long public career, including many years representing Texas in the U.S. Congress, and Culberson County was later named for him.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Culberson's story complicates a simple picture of the Confederacy. He was a Unionist who ended up in Confederate service, which describes many Southerners in 1861. They opposed breaking up the Union but went with their states once the decision was made. That tension between conviction and loyalty runs through the history of the war.

The marker also points to something national histories often skip: the Civil War in the West was fought on more than one front. In Texas, the war with the Union overlapped with a separate conflict on the frontier involving Native nations who had their own reasons and alliances. The effects fell on Texas settlers and on the tribes, and they shaped the violent frontier decade that came after 1865.

This marker was put up in 1963 as a memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy, during the Civil War centennial, a time when Americans were again debating how to remember the war. Reading it now shows both the history it records and the way that history was commemorated.

🧭If you visit

Van Horn is a crossroads town in far West Texas. Culberson County has some of the most dramatic scenery in the state, with big desert basins, mountain ranges, and long empty views. The contrast with the man it's named for is interesting: a Georgian who served in Mississippi, remembered in country that looks nothing like where he fought.

Read both sides of the marker. The front tells one man's war, and the back looks at the frontier and the Native nations caught up in the conflict. Together they give a fuller view than many markers from the same era.

Van Horn is a common stop on Interstate 10, and it works well as a base for exploring the region. Guadalupe Mountains National Park, also in Culberson County, is within reach, and the wide landscapes all around give a sense of how hard defending the frontier must have been.