Monte Verdi Family Slaves
Cushing, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Monte Verdi, the 10,700-acre antebellum plantation of Julien Sidney Devereux and Sarah (Landrum) Devereux Garrison, was one of the most economically and historically significant plantations in the state. Devereux family papers at regional and state archives preserve a record of names of the enslaved people who labored here. Their written family history begins with Scott and Tabby, born 1792 and 1787 respectively, the eldest in John William Devereux’s group of slaves who were taken with their children and grandchildren from Georgia to Alabama to Texas. Documented African American families at Monte Verdi in 1846 included Scott and Tabby, their son, Anderson, and his wife (unnamed). Other couples included Judy and Jim, Sam (from the Loftus plantation) and (Eliza Henry) Mariah, Jinny and Peter, Joanna and Joe, (el) Mina and Walton, Maria and Lewis, and Green and Phoebe, who founded the Anadarco (Anadarko) Christian church and school in 1868. Julien Devereux’s 1856 probate records name 80 slaves on the estate. After obtaining their freedom in 1865, these resilient men and women paved the way for better lives for themselves and future generations. Some families stayed in the area, continuing to work and live in villages and communities which comprise the former lands of Monte Verdi. As documented in the 1870-1900 U.S. Census and other records, descendants of the 80 Monte Verdi slaves rarely adopted the surname Devereux, but instead names including Anderson, Bagley, Blanton, Booker, Bowens, Bradley (Julien’s first wife’s family), Brantley, Caddell, Cary, Cooper, Freeny, Henry, Lewis, Loftis, McDaniel, Owens, Spencer, Sturns, Tipps, Williams and others. Today these family names are recognized for their humanitarian contributions. (2018)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Monte Verdi was the 10,700-acre plantation of Julien Sidney Devereux, and this marker names the enslaved men, women, and children whose labor sustained it—people like Scott and Tabby, born in the 1780s and 1790s, carried from Georgia to Alabama to Texas, and the many families documented in 1846 and in the 1856 probate that listed 80 enslaved people. Freed in 1865, they built new lives on the plantation's former lands, and their descendants—rarely taking the Devereux name—carried surnames like Anderson, Booker, Henry, and Lewis into the surrounding communities. One couple, Green and Phoebe, founded the Anadarko Christian church and school in 1868.
Why it matters
By recording enslaved people by name, the marker restores individual identity to those whom plantation records usually reduced to numbers, and traces the freedpeople and families who built the community that followed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This memorial stands on the land of Monte Verdi, a plantation that once sprawled across 10,700 acres of antebellum East Texas — one of the largest and most significant in the state. But the history it insists you remember is not the grandeur of the estate. It is the lives of the people whose forced labor made that grandeur possible.
The era was the decades before the Civil War, when cotton and enslaved labor built enormous fortunes across the South, and the plantation frontier pushed westward into Texas. Enslaved families were not only worked but moved — uprooted and carried across states as their enslavers chased new land. The written family history preserved here begins with Scott, born in 1792, and Tabby, born in 1787, the eldest in a group of enslaved people taken from Georgia to Alabama and finally to Texas.
That journey — Georgia to Alabama to Texas — is the antebellum South's westward expansion told from the inside, as a forced march of families who had no say in where they would live, labor, or die.
People & events
What makes this marker rare is that it names people. Plantation ledgers usually reduced human beings to counts and dollar values; here the record fights back with names. Alongside Scott and Tabby stood their son Anderson and his wife. The documented families of 1846 included Judy and Jim; Sam, who came from the Loftus plantation, and Mariah; Jinny and Peter; Joanna and Joe; Mina and Walton; Maria and Lewis; and Green and Phoebe. Julien Devereux's probate records of 1856 named eighty enslaved people on the estate.
Among them, Green and Phoebe carry the story forward into freedom: in 1868 they founded the Anadarco Christian church and school, planting an institution of faith and learning almost as soon as freedom allowed.
After emancipation in 1865, these men and women built new lives, many of them staying on the very land where they had been held, gathering into villages and communities across the former plantation. And when they chose surnames, they largely did not take Devereux. Instead the descendants of the eighty carried names including Anderson, Bagley, Blanton, Booker, Bowens, Bradley, Brantley, Caddell, Cary, Cooper, Freeny, Henry, Lewis, Loftis, McDaniel, Owens, Spencer, Sturns, Tipps, Williams, and others — names honored today for their families' contributions.
Its place in the American story
For most of American history, the enslaved were the great unnamed. Their labor built the wealth of a nation, yet the documents that survive tend to list them the way one lists property. To read a marker that recovers their names — birth years, marriages, the church they founded, the surnames they chose in freedom — is to witness a deliberate act of historical repair.
The detail about names is quietly powerful. That so many descendants declined the enslaver's surname, choosing their own instead, is a small declaration of independence repeated across the South after 1865 — freedom expressed in the most personal thing a person owns, their name.
This is the larger American story turned right-side up. The plantation's acreage and its owner's prominence are the version history usually preserves. The version this memorial preserves — the families, their endurance, and the communities their descendants built — is the one the country spent far too long forgetting, and the one that tells us who actually did the work of making this place.
If you visit
Come to this memorial ready to read slowly. Its power is in its list of names, and the only way to honor it is to take them one at a time — Scott and Tabby, born in the 1780s and 1790s; Green and Phoebe, church founders; the long roll of surnames that fanned out into the surrounding country. Say a few of them aloud. That is the point of the place.
Look out at the landscape and understand that the fields and communities around you are the former lands of a single vast plantation, and that many of the families here descend directly from the people the marker names. This is not distant history; it is neighborhood history, still carried in local family names.
It is a reflective, humbling stop rather than a scenic one. Give it more time than a roadside marker usually gets. You are standing where eighty documented human beings labored in bondage and then, in freedom, chose their own names and built what came next — and this memorial exists so that you will know they were here, and know what they were called.
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
- · Julien Sidney Devereux
- · Green and Phoebe
Related events
- · Emancipation
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Monte Verdi
Rusk County, TX
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.
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In 1868 formerly enslaved people from the Devereaux plantation founded the community of Anadarko and the Anadarko Christian Church, which hosted the area's first Black public school. With $900 from Julius Rosenwald's fund, plus public and family donations, a three-teacher Rosenwald School was built here in 1926, later renamed for principal U. E. Allen. Only the gymnasium's pier-and-beam foundation now remains of the school that served the community until integration.
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