County Named for Texas Confederate William R. Scurry 1821-1864

🏛️The era

When Texas faced the question of secession in early 1861, a convention of delegates met to decide it, and William R. Scurry was one of them. Its vote to leave the Union put Texas on the path into the Confederacy and four years of war, and many of the men who sat in that hall went on to wear Confederate uniforms.

The war reached Texans far from home. Early on, Confederate forces from Texas marched west into New Mexico Territory, hoping to seize the Southwest for the Confederacy. Later, the fighting came closer: Union forces occupied Galveston, the state's main port, and in 1864 a large Union campaign up the Red River threatened to open a path into Texas itself.

This marker went up in 1963 as part of a statewide series during the Civil War centennial. It says so plainly: it is a memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy. That makes it a document of two eras, the war it describes and the time it was placed, when the South was marking the centennial even as the civil rights movement was challenging the order the Confederacy had fought to keep.

👥People & events

Scurry's war began with the 4th Texas Cavalry Regiment, where he served as lieutenant colonel in the campaign into New Mexico and Arizona. The marker credits him with ably commanding forces at Val Verde and at Glorieta Canyon, the fight often called the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Glorieta became a turning point: Union troops destroyed the Confederate supply train, and the Texans' campaign in the Southwest collapsed after it.

Scurry was promoted to brigadier general and returned to fight on Texas soil. In 1863 he commanded the immediate land attack when Confederate forces recaptured Galveston from the Union, a victory that restored the port to Confederate control.

His last campaign came in 1864. Union forces pushed up the Red River in an effort to reach Texas, and Scurry led his brigade at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in Louisiana, where the Union advance was turned back. The fighting then shifted north into Arkansas, and at Jenkins' Ferry Scurry was killed in battle. He was in his early forties.

Texas later gave his name to a county, and it is that county, with this marker at its seat in Snyder, that carries his memory across the West Texas landscape.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Scurry's career takes you across much of the war's western side, a part of the Civil War often overshadowed by Virginia and Gettysburg. His battles traced the Confederacy's failed attempt to win the Southwest, the contest for Texas's coast, and the Red River Campaign in Louisiana and Arkansas.

The marker also shows how Americans chose to remember that war. It was erected by the State of Texas as a memorial to Confederate service, and it praises bravery without mentioning what the Confederacy fought to preserve: slavery. Many of the South's Confederate monuments and markers went up long after the war, in waves that coincided with periods of struggle over civil rights, and that later context shapes what they say.

Today memorials like this one are being widely reexamined. Historians and communities are asking not only what they record about the past, but what their builders wanted to say about the present. Reading this marker with both eras in mind makes it a richer historical source: a record of a man, a campaign and the way one generation chose to remember him.

🧭If you visit

This marker stands in Snyder, the seat of the county that carries Scurry's name, even though he never fought here. That distance is itself worth noticing. The marker belongs to a statewide tradition of naming counties after figures from Texas's early history and marking the reasons in bronze and stone.

Read the marker slowly and notice both what it says and what it leaves out. For older children and teens this can open a thoughtful conversation about how a monument is also a message, and how the date a memorial was built can matter as much as the event it recalls.

If your road trip takes you through West Texas, this makes a short, thought-provoking stop. It can also be a starting point for a longer journey: the campaigns named on it stretch from New Mexico to Galveston to Louisiana and Arkansas, and several of those battle sites are preserved places you can visit.