Glasscock County
Garden City, Glasscock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Created in 1887. Organized 1893, with Garden City county seat. Named for George W. Glasscock (1810-68), flatboating partner of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. Came to Texas 1834 and fought 1835-36 in the War for Independence from Mexico. Built first Central Texas flour mill, Williamson County. Georgetown was named for him. Was in Texas Legislature, 1864- 68. Of the 254 Texas counties, 42 bear Indian, French or Spanish names. 10 honor such colonizers as Stephen F. Austin, "Father of Texas". 12 were named for Washington, Clay, and other American patriots. 96 were named for men like Glasscock who fought in the Texas War for Independence (15 dying at the Alamo), signed the Declaration of Independence, or served as statesmen in the Republic of Texas. 23 have the names of frontiersmen and pioneers. 11 honor American statesmen who worked for the annexation of Texas; 10, leaders in Texas since statehood, including jurists, ministers, educators, historians, statesmen; and 36, men prominent in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Midland and 8 others have geographical names. San Jacinto and Val Verde were named for battles. Live Oak and Orange for trees, and Mason for a Fort.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Glasscock County, created in 1887 and organized in 1893 with Garden City as its seat, honors George W. Glasscock (1810–68), a onetime flatboating partner of Abraham Lincoln in Illinois who came to Texas in 1834. He fought in the Texas War for Independence, built central Texas's first flour mill, and lent his name to Georgetown before serving in the state legislature. The marker also surveys how Texas's 254 counties were named — for patriots, revolutionaries, frontiersmen, statesmen, and Confederate figures.
Why it matters
The county's namesake ties the Texas Revolution and frontier settlement to the wider American story, even sharing a youthful chapter with the future president Lincoln.
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Related people
- · George W. Glasscock
- · Abraham Lincoln
- · Stephen F. Austin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Glasscock County Courthouse and Jail
Garden City, TX
Barely a month after Glasscock County organized in 1893, its first commissioners' court issued bonds for a combination courthouse and jail, completed in 1894 with the ground floor for court and the upper floor for the jail. As the county grew, a grander 2½-story Classical Revival courthouse rose in 1910, built of three-foot-thick native stone quarried from a local ranch and crowned with colossal Doric columns. That 1910 courthouse has served continuously ever since, while the original building continued as a jail into 1980.
Garden City Cemetery
Garden City, TX
The Garden City community began burying its dead here as early as 1886, when a child of county commissioner Sullivan Hill and his wife Lucy was laid to rest; a sibling joined the grave four years later, the two sharing a single stone. Early West Texas family names—Hanson, Gooch, Cox—recur across the plots, many bordered by concrete curbing and set off by decorative iron fencing in the older section. John Etheridge and Perneice Gore Lawler formally dedicated the original one-acre tract in 1914, and the county tends the enlarged grounds today.
Camp Elizabeth
Sterling City, TX
Camp Elizabeth, thought to date to 1853, served from 1874 to 1886 as an outpost hospital and sub-post of Fort Concho during the height of the frontier military presence on the West Texas plains. Such outposts anchored the U.S. Army's effort to secure travel routes and settlements during the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. Little remains, but its role in the network of frontier defense endures in memory.
Route of Marcy's Trail
Big Spring, TX
In October 1849, Captain Randolph B. Marcy led an Army escort guarding gold-rush emigrants west and, following a chain of springs known to his Comanche guide Manuel, mapped a route that reached the Big Spring. His survey helped explode the myth that West Texas was an impassable desert. The trail he charted was later worn by emigrant wagons and eventually traced by a stagecoach line and transcontinental railroad.