Joseph Bird
Round Mountain, Blanco County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(July 15, 1821-August 15, 1909) For more than 50 years after becoming a pioneer settler of this area, North Carolina native Joseph Bird greatly contributed to the development of Blanco County as a distinguished frontier Baptist minister, postmaster, Civil War soldier, county judge, rancher, and prominent community leader. Bird married Eliza L. Doriss in Arkansas in 1844. About 1854 they and their six children settled on land between Cypress Creek and the Pedernales River. They built a log cabin close to this site about 1858 and eventually their family grew to include 12 children. The area's pioneer settlement, called Birdtown in Joseph's honor, was renamed Round Mountain by the time a post office was established here in 1857. Bird served as postmaster in 1859-66 and in 1873-74. For the Baptist churches he helped found in the area Bird served as an itinerant pastor and performed marriages, baptisms, and funeral services. He enlisted in the Confederate army as a first lieutenant in 1862 and was stationed at Camp Groce, Waller County, Texas. Bird moved to Johnson City while serving his two terms as Blanco county judge in the early 1890s. Eliza Bird died in 1896 and in 1900 Joseph married Martha A. Gill. Bird was buried in the Round Mountain Cemetery. (1994)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
North Carolina native Joseph Bird brought his family to the land between Cypress Creek and the Pedernales around 1854, and for half a century helped build Blanco County as a frontier Baptist circuit minister, postmaster, rancher, and county judge. The settlement that grew up around him was first called Birdtown before being renamed Round Mountain, where a post office opened in 1857. Bird rode a preaching circuit, founded churches, and served as a Confederate first lieutenant during the Civil War.
Why it matters
Bird represents the pioneer clergymen-leaders who carried both faith and civic order into the Texas Hill Country as it was first being settled.
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Related people
- · Joseph Bird
- · Eliza L. Doriss
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dr. James Odiorne
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Dr. James Odiorne practiced medicine in Illinois and Kentucky before settling in Texas in 1857 and moving to Blanco County in 1860, where he became a leading pioneer physician and civic figure. He served as a Confederate surgeon at Fort Mason during the Civil War and later as county commissioner, chief justice, and even newspaper owner. Riding by horseback or gig in all weather, and short on manufactured drugs, he turned to native herbs and even grew garden poppies for opium — a compounding accident with alcohol ultimately cost him his life.
James Polk Johnson
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Georgia-born and raised in DeWitt County, James Polk Johnson served in the Confederate army before joining his uncles in the Blanco County cattle business, which he bought and made his own by 1871. In 1879 he founded a new town on the Pedernales River — Johnson City — and worked to develop it, though his ambition to make it the county seat was not realized until 1891, six years after his death.
General Adam R. Johnson
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Adam Rankin Johnson made his name as a Confederate cavalry raider, riding with Nathan Bedford Forrest before commanding his own Partisan Rangers on daring strikes behind Union lines in Kentucky and Indiana — including the audacious capture of Newburgh with a dozen men and a fake 'cannon' made from a stovepipe. Blinded by a gunshot wound in 1864, he returned to Burnet County and, sightless, became one of frontier Texas's great builders: a mail contractor, surveyor, and the founder of Marble Falls, whom he championed for its water power on the Colorado River. Erected by the State of Texas in 1963 as a memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy.
Hopewell Cemetery
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Pioneers who reached this stretch of Williamson County in the 1840s founded the town of Hopewell and endured the dangers of frontier life, including Comanche raids — Wofford and Mary Johnson and their daughter were killed nearby in 1863. The cemetery grew up around the earlier grave of Cornelia Johnson and was deeded to a local congregation in 1877. Today the graveyard, holding area pioneers and Civil War veterans, is the only trace left of the Hopewell community.