Founding of Town of Marion, 1877
Marion, Guadalupe County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway was chartered in 1870 to give interior Texas ready access to Gulf of Mexico ports. As the tracks proceeded west of the Guadalupe, Col. Thomas W. Peirce (1818-85), major investor in the G.H. & S.A., bought land here near a country store and hotel. Platting a town named for his daughter, he obtained a U.S. Post Office on May 31, 1877. A public sale of lots was held on June 20, 1877. Within a year, Marion's 3-acre railyard was known for vast quantities of shipping. By 1900, public school, churches, and other facilities were thriving. (1977)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Marion owes its existence to the railroad. When the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway pushed west of the Guadalupe to link inland Texas with Gulf ports, investor Col. Thomas W. Peirce bought land near a country store and platted a town, naming it for his daughter and securing a post office in 1877. Within a year its three-acre railyard was shipping in volume, and by 1900 schools and churches had made it a settled community.
Why it matters
Marion is a textbook example of the railroad town—a place willed into being by a rail line's route, showing how tracks, not rivers or trails, dictated where Gilded Age Texas would grow.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Col. Thomas W. Peirce
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cibolo
Cibolo, TX
Cibolo took root in 1875 when the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railroad pushed a line across western Guadalupe County. A general store opened the next year to serve the largely German settlers, and a post office followed in 1876, giving the town a name drawn from an Indian word for buffalo. For a time it was also called Fromme's Store after Charles Fromme bought the business in 1882; the community finally incorporated in 1965.
Schertz
Schertz, TX
Schertz began in the 1840s when German immigrants from the New Braunfels area spread out in search of good farmland along Cibolo Creek. The community lived by agriculture until the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad arrived about 1877, linking it to San Antonio and wider markets. Once known as Cibolo Pit and Cutoff, the town took the name Schertz — for early settler Sebastian Schertz — when its post office opened in 1882.
Cibolo Crossing on the Gonzales Road
La Vernia, TX
Under Mexican rule, the Gonzales Road linked the DeWitt Colony settlement of Gonzales to San Antonio de Béxar, fording the Cibolo Creek at a natural crossing about twenty-two miles east of the town. That ford ran through land granted to spy Erastus "Deaf" Smith, who is said to have watched Mexican troops from a nearby tree in 1835. The crossing became a rendezvous during the Texas Revolution, where relief forces under captains like Juan Seguín and Albert Martin gathered in early 1836 hoping to reinforce the Alamo, before annexation and new roads left the old ford abandoned.
Rector Chapel Cemetery
La Vernia, TX
This cemetery grew from the friendship of two early La Vernia settlers: William Wiseman, who ran the town's first cotton gin, and William Claiborne Rector, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto who farmed, carried the mail, and supplied horses for the stage line. Together they organized the Cibolo Presbyterian Church in 1852, and after Rector's death Wiseman built a new chapel on his farm named in his friend's honor, setting aside four acres in 1877 for worship and burial. Though the chapel itself was moved to town in 1891, the weathered gravestones still mark the community's founding generation.