Harmon General Hospital Chapel
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Authorized by the U. S. Army n 1942 and named for Col. Daniel Warrick Harmon, Harmon General Hospital was in operation from November 1942 to December 1945. This ecumenical chapel opened in January 1943. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy served here. The hospital property was acquired by the Le Tourneau Foundation in 1946 for use as a college. Despite several years as a storage facility, the chapel retained enough of its original fabric for renovation in the late 1950s and again in 1983 when it was formally named Speer Chapel. The structure remains a well-preserved vernacular chapel. Its notable features include a front-facing gabled roof, center projecting entrance with the roof below a central steeple, and wood sash windows. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1997
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Harmon General Hospital, authorized by the U.S. Army in 1942 and named for Col. Daniel Warrick Harmon, treated servicemen in Longview from late 1942 until the end of 1945. This ecumenical chapel, opened in January 1943, served Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish personnel alike. After the war the property became a college campus, and the well-preserved little chapel was renovated and formally named Speer Chapel.
Why it matters
The chapel is a quiet witness to the vast home-front medical effort of World War II and to the shared faith that sustained wounded soldiers far from the front lines.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- ¡ Daniel Warrick Harmon
Related events
- ¡ World War II
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sugar Hill Cemetery
Beckville, TX
Settlement here reaches back to Elijah Wyatt, who came to Texas in 1838 and is thought to lie in this ground, though the earliest marked grave belongs to a man who died in 1861. Set aside alongside a meeting house in the 1850s, the plot grew into a community cemetery holding scores of marked and unmarked graves. Its rows include veterans of both the Civil War and World War II, spanning a century of local life.
Camp Fannin Internment Camp World War II P.O.W. Camp
Winona, TX
Alongside its role training American soldiers, Camp Fannin near Tyler became a prisoner-of-war camp, receiving its first captives from Germany's Afrika Korps in October 1943. By 1944 it was designated a POW base camp overseeing smaller branch camps across East Texas, and with wartime labor scarce, prisoners were put to work in the region's forests and farms. The camp held more than 1,000 prisoners at a time and closed in May 1946 after repatriating them.
Longview Train Depot
Longview, TX
Longview owes its existence to the railroad: in 1870 O. H. Methvin deeded 150 acres to the Southern Pacific, and by 1871 the town had become the line's western terminus, soon a junction where the International & Great Northern crossed. The Texas and Pacific replaced an 1874 station with the Colonial Revival depot completed in 1940, whose passengers reached the platform through a tunnel and whose walls bore stylized quoins, keystones, and grey stone trim. Once boasting three depots, Longview retains only this one â the last survivor of the railway network that created the town.
Site of James S. Hogg Newspaper
Longview, TX
Here in 1871, at just twenty years old, James Stephen Hogg founded his first newspaper, the Longview News. In its pages he pressed for better schools and government while campaigning against radical Reconstruction policies, railroad subsidies, and frontier lawlessness. The three-year venture sharpened the leadership that carried him to become, in 1891, the first native-born governor of Texas.