Judge Henry Clay Pleasants
Cuero, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Graduate, University of Virginia, admitted to bar and practiced law in Virginia until moving to Clinton, Texas, 1854. Was judge 40 years of 23rd District Court. Admired for his courage and impartiality. Despite threats against his life, called in the Texas Rangers in 1876 to bring law to De Witt County. Was elected in 1892 justice of 1st Supreme District, Galveston. Served there until his death. Recorded, 1968
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Trained at the University of Virginia, Henry Clay Pleasants moved to Texas in 1854 and served four decades on the bench of the 23rd District Court. Facing threats to his life, in 1876 he called in the Texas Rangers to break the lawlessness of DeWitt County during its notorious feud years. He later won election to the state's First Supreme Judicial District at Galveston, serving until his death.
Why it matters
Pleasants embodies the hard, often dangerous work of bringing courtroom order to the Texas frontier, where the rule of law had to be enforced against violence.
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Related people
- · Henry Clay Pleasants
Related events
- · Sutton-Taylor feud era (DeWitt County)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Thomas M. Stell
Cuero, TX
Born in Florida and raised in Texas, Thomas M. Stell came up as a cowboy, driving cattle north to Kansas and Wyoming before studying at Covey College in Concrete. Elected sheriff of DeWitt County in 1892, he held the office fifteen years, relying on persuasiveness and tact — and once numbered the notorious gunman John Wesley Hardin among his prisoners. A member of the Old Trail Drivers Association, he served as president of the Texas Sheriffs Association.
De Witt County
Cuero, TX
This ground lay within Green De Witt's 1825 empresario grant and became DeWitt County in 1846, its seat shifting from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero in 1876. Settled first by Anglo-Americans and, by 1860, half by German immigrants, the county sent its men into nearly every fight of the Texas Revolution — the Alamo, Goliad, Gonzales, and San Jacinto among them. The marker rolls out a long honor list of the pioneers and soldiers who founded and defended it.
First Presbyterian Church of Cuero
Cuero, TX
On July 8, 1849, settlers gathered beneath a live oak at the home of Dr. Robert and Mary Peebles to form Live Oak Presbyterian Church, the first Presbyterian congregation in DeWitt County. Led by the Rev. William Cochran Blair, the church moved to the county seat at Clinton in 1851, and over the following decades several area congregations rose and eventually merged into a single church at Cuero by 1883. Congregations from Indianola and Thomaston later joined as well, keeping the church at the center of community life.
James Norman Smith
Cuero, TX
They called James Norman Smith "Uncle Jimmy the Peacemaker," and his long life stitched together much of early Texas. Educated in North Carolina and a teacher in Tennessee — where one of his pupils was the future president James K. Polk — he came to Texas in 1840 and taught the first school in what became DeWitt County. He then surveyed the county, served as its first clerk, organized Presbyterian churches across the region and its first Masonic lodge, and at an 1857 rally introduced his old Tennessee friend Sam Houston to the crowd.