Monte Verdi
Rusk County, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Frontier version, southern Greek architecture. So placed that most of Rusk and much of Cherokee and Nacogdoches counties are visible from upstairs porch. Built on his 10,000 acre plantation by Julien Sidney Devereux (1805-56), justice of the peace, county commissioner, legislator. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1964
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built by Julien Sidney Devereux (1805–1856)—a justice of the peace, county commissioner, and legislator—Monte Verdi was a frontier interpretation of southern Greek Revival architecture, set so high on his roughly 10,000-acre plantation that much of Rusk, Cherokee, and Nacogdoches counties could be seen from its upstairs porch. It was one of the most significant antebellum plantations in Texas, worked by scores of enslaved people whose labor made its scale possible. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.
Why it matters
Monte Verdi embodies the wealth, architecture, and human cost of the cotton-plantation economy that shaped antebellum East Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Julien Sidney Devereux
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Baysinger Cemetery
Cushing, TX
In 1839, soon after moving his family from Tennessee, Martin Baysinger received a 640-acre land grant in what became Rusk County and built up a plantation with a grist mill, cotton gin, brick pit, syrup mill, store, and post office. His holdings eventually approached 7,000 acres, and he set aside this small burial ground at the death of his first wife in 1870. A wooden grave house and the markers of enslaved people said to be buried nearby are now gone, leaving graves that record the county's pioneer era.
Henry Cemetery
Gallatin, TX
Henry Cemetery grew from the graves of a remarkable migration: Woodson Henry and roughly thirty-five Muskogee (Creek) families who left Chambers County, Alabama, for Texas in the 1830s. The burial ground was founded in 1852 when Ezekiel Henry laid his daughter to rest, and it soon held the whole extended family. A section in the northeast corner holds African American burials, including Peter Johnson, a formerly enslaved man given Jinkins family property upon his emancipation, and a World War I veteran, Aaron Quarll.
Shiloh Cemetery
Mt. Enterprise, TX
Shiloh Cemetery took root in 1853 with the burial of Maranda Gilbreath, and four years later settler Josiah Johnson formally set the land aside as a public burial ground for a young East Texas community. Among its graves lie pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans, along with many unmarked burials thought to be those of enslaved people. Its Fourth of July cleaning tradition, begun in 1876, turned upkeep of the dead into an annual civic ritual, and the ground sits beside Trammel's Trace, one of the region's oldest wagon roads.
Bridges Cemetery
Chapman, TX
This burial ground began in 1861 when Eli Buckner set aside a half-acre around his family's graves as a public cemetery, and it grew as pioneer families poured into the Chapman community—among them the Reverend J. C. Alford Bridges, who reportedly arrived from the Deep South with ten children in twenty covered wagons. A Confederate veteran, Bridges bought the land in gold and gave it his name, and his descendants served as postmasters and neighbors for generations. Today the cemetery holds pioneers, dozens of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam, and, in unmarked graves, people believed to have been enslaved.