Near Homesite of Judge Andrew S. Broaddus
Cooks Point, Burleson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Noted pioneer leader. Member Virginia House of Delegates (1844-45). Piloted to Texas (1854) a mile-long wagon train of 200 people, who built Salem Baptist Church-- reminder of their Virginia home. Broaddus debated the Hon.Sam Houston at Waugh Campground (8 Mi. W), 1857. He served in 1861 in Texas Secession Convention; 9th (1861-63) Texas Legislature; 13th Texas Legislature (1873); also on commission to locate and build Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College (now university); judge, 32nd District (1874-75; 1879-80). Married twice, had 13 children. (1971)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Andrew S. Broaddus was already a Virginia legislator when, in 1854, he led a mile-long wagon train of some 200 people west to the Texas frontier, where the newcomers raised Salem Baptist Church as a piece of the home they'd left behind. A restless public man, he debated Sam Houston at a nearby campground, sat in the 1861 Secession Convention and several sessions of the Texas Legislature, and helped choose the site for what became Texas A&M. He closed his life as a district judge, father of thirteen, on the land near this spot.
Why it matters
His trek embodies the great mid-century migration that carried Southern families and institutions into Texas, and his hand in founding the state's first public college ties one frontier household to the shaping of Texas itself.
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Related people
- · Andrew S. Broaddus
- · Sam Houston
Related events
- · Texas Secession Convention of 1861
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Waugh Campground
Caldwell, TX
Donated by the Baltimore-born Addison family, this Methodist camp-meeting ground honored Bishop Beverly Waugh, who presided over the first Methodist Conference in Texas. In the frontier decades it drew crowds for revivals and quarterly conferences—here the young B. H. Carroll, later a towering Baptist leader, was converted. Its open grounds also hosted secular events, most famously an 1857 debate between U.S. Senator Sam Houston and Judge A. S. Broaddus.
Cooks Point
Cooks Point, TX
Cooks Point took root about 1840 where a colonial road from the southeast met the old San Antonio Road, a natural crossroads in the earliest years of the Republic of Texas. Settler Gabriel Jackson kept a two-story log cabin trading post here, and the community took its name from surveyor Silas L. Cooke, who mapped much of the surrounding land. It endures today as a rural village.
Elizabeth Chapel Methodist Church
Caldwell, TX
The first Methodist congregation in Burleson County began as a Sunday school in the home of early settler Isaac Addison and later met at the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Scott. Organized around 1839 by the pioneer minister Robert Alexander, it soon raised a small hand-hewn frame building named for Mrs. Scott, whose son Phillip deeded the church and cemetery land in 1878. Membership peaked at 165 in 1885 before the congregation merged with the Cooks Point church around 1907.
Fort Tenoxtitlan
Caldwell, TX
Founded by Mexico in 1830 as a bulwark against Anglo-American immigration, Fort Tenoxtitlan took the ancient Aztec name for Mexico City, meaning "prickly pear place," and its commandant even dreamed of it becoming Texas's capital. The plan backfired as Mexican soldiers and Anglo pioneers became friends and the empresario Sterling C. Robertson funneled in settlers. After troops withdrew in 1832 the site passed to the Anglos, and among its residents were five signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, an Alamo martyr, and seven veterans of San Jacinto before it was abandoned amid Indian raids in 1841.