Here Lived Dr. Stephen H. Everitt
Jasper, Jasper County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Born in New York November 26, 1807 Came to Texas in 1835 Delegate to the Consultation 1835 Signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836 Senator in the Congress Republic of Texas Oct. 3, 1836 to Dec. 9, 1840 Died July 12, 1844 Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
A New York-born physician who reached Texas in 1835, Stephen H. Everitt threw himself into the fight for independence just as the colony broke with Mexico. He sat as a delegate to the Consultation of 1835, put his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, and then served four years in the Senate of the new Republic of Texas. This 1936 Centennial marker records the home of one of the men who helped turn a rebellion into a functioning government.
Why it matters
Everitt was among the small circle of founders who signed Texas into existence and then did the unglamorous work of governing a frontier republic — a reminder that independence was only the beginning of nation-building.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The marker to Dr. Stephen H. Everitt belongs to the most dramatic chapter in Texas history: the brief, turbulent birth of the Republic. Everitt was born in New York on November 26, 1807, and came to Texas in 1835 — arriving, as it happened, at the precise moment the colony was breaking with Mexico. Anglo-American settlers had been pouring into the Mexican province of Texas for a decade, and by 1835 their grievances with the central government in Mexico City had reached a breaking point.
This was the era of the Early Republic, when Texas was about to spend a short, intense span as an independent nation before joining the United States. The men who shaped that republic were, like Everitt, often recent arrivals — people who had staked their futures on a frontier that was suddenly convulsed by revolution. To reach Texas in 1835 was to walk straight into the founding.
Everitt's home stood in the Jasper area, in the deep pine woods of far East Texas, close to the Louisiana border and to the settled routes by which many newcomers entered the province. It was from communities like this that the delegates and soldiers of the revolution were drawn.
People & events
The marker traces a public life that moved quickly from protest to founding to governing. Everitt was a delegate to the Consultation of 1835, the convention of Texas colonists that met to weigh their course as tensions with Mexico boiled over. It gathered at San Felipe de Austin, the administrative heart of Stephen F. Austin's colony, and it was one of the first formal steps toward a break.
The following year Everitt put his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence. That document was adopted in 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where delegates declared Texas free of Mexico even as an army marched against them. To sign it was an act of considerable nerve; the men who did so were pledging themselves to a revolution whose outcome was far from certain.
When independence was won, Everitt turned to the unglamorous labor of making the new nation function. He served as a Senator in the Congress of the Republic of Texas from October 3, 1836, to December 9, 1840 — the young republic's opening years, when its first Congress convened at Columbia and the basic institutions of government were being invented from nothing. He died on July 12, 1844, not living to see Texas join the United States the following year.
Its place in the American story
Everitt belonged to the small circle of men who signed Texas into existence and then stayed to govern it, and that combination is the heart of why he matters. Declaring independence is the memorable act, the one that gets into the history books; the far harder and less celebrated work is building a functioning state afterward — writing laws, raising revenue, defending borders, and doing it all for a frontier republic that was perpetually short of money.
His four years in the Senate span exactly that founding period. The Republic of Texas was an improbable thing, a sovereign nation carved out of a revolution and sustained for nearly a decade before annexation. That it worked at all was the achievement of legislators like Everitt, whose names are far less famous than the battles but whose committee work and votes actually held the government together.
The marker's own history is part of the national story too. It was erected by the State of Texas in 1936, during the Texas Centennial — a statewide program that marked a hundred years of independence by placing memorials across Texas to the people and places of the revolution. This marker is one of that program's countless small monuments to the founders.
If you visit
You are in Jasper, in the Piney Woods of deep East Texas — tall pines, red earth, and a landscape that still feels close to the frontier country Everitt would have known. This is memorial ground rather than a preserved house or a battlefield; the marker records where a founder of the Republic once lived.
Notice that the stone dates from 1936, and let that be part of what you see. You are looking at two layers of history at once: the life of a man who signed the Declaration and served in the Republic's Senate, and the Centennial generation that, a hundred years later, chose to honor him with this marker. Both are worth a moment's thought.
For a traveler building a route through the sites of the Texas Revolution and the Republic, a marker like this offers something the famous sites cannot. It points not to a great battle but to a founder's front door, and it reminds you that independence was declared by ordinary men who then went home to towns like this one and got on with the work of governing.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Stephen H. Everitt
Related events
- · Consultation of 1835
- · Texas Declaration of Independence
Themes & tags
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