Gregg County
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Rusk and Upshur counties. Created April 12, 1873; organized June 28, 1873. Named in honor of General John Gregg (1828-1864). Delegate to Secession Convention and to the Provisional Congress of the Southern Confederacy; a Confederate officer. Longview, the county seat.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Created and organized in 1873 from parts of Rusk and Upshur counties, Gregg County was named for General John Gregg, a delegate to the Secession Convention and the Provisional Confederate Congress who died as a Confederate officer in 1864. Longview serves as the county seat.
Why it matters
The county's naming reflects how post-Civil War Texas honored its Confederate leaders even as it built new civic institutions during Reconstruction.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Gregg
Related events
- · Texas Secession Convention
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
General John Gregg
Longview, TX
John Gregg came to Texas from Alabama in 1854 and rose from district judge to Confederate congressman before raising the 7th Texas Infantry in 1861. Captured at Fort Donelson and later exchanged, he was promoted to brigadier general, fought through the Vicksburg Campaign, and was badly wounded at Chickamauga. Returning to duty in 1864, he led the famed Hood's Texas Brigade in Virginia until he was killed in action near Richmond that October. The marker also recalls his role in the 1861 Secession Convention that carried Texas out of the Union.
John Tyson Smith
Longview, TX
Born in 1846, John Tyson Smith moved as a boy from Alabama to Upshur County and, after serving in the Confederate army, settled in Longview around 1872. He built a long career in public life—city tax assessor, justice of the peace, and five terms as Gregg County judge—while developing downtown real estate and running the Smith Upstairs Opera House in the early 1900s.
Greenwood Cemetery
Longview, TX
Laid out in 1877 just beyond Longview's limits and beside a new railroad subdivision, this burial ground became the resting place for the town's founding generation. Its rows hold a War of 1812 veteran, dozens of Confederate soldiers, victims of the 1894 Dalton Gang bank robbery, and a family lost in the 1900 Galveston hurricane, alongside civic fathers like O.H. Methvin, called the father of Longview. Renamed Greenwood in 1905 when the city grew to enclose it, the cemetery reads almost as a directory of the region's past.
Wartime Home Industry
Longview, TX
On this site from 1861 to 1865, settler Joseph M. Sparkman ran a shop making shoes for the Confederate Army, directing the work from his cot because arthritis had left him unable to stand. The actual shoemaking was supervised and taught by "Uncle Ben," an enslaved craftsman who had come with him from Georgia and who trained the boys and old men left behind by the war. Both men are buried in the family plot nearby.