Neil McLennan
Waco, McLennan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Pioneer Texan for whom McLennan County was named born on the Isle of Skye, Scotland Sept. 2, 1787. Came to Texas in 1834 died in 1867. Mrs. Neil McLennan born in North Carolina August, 1797 died in 1871.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Neil McLennan was born on Scotland's Isle of Skye in 1787 and came to Texas in 1834, joining the early Anglo and immigrant settlers pushing into the region's river country. He lived until 1867, and the central Texas county surrounding Waco bears his name. His wife, born in North Carolina in 1797, survived him by four years.
Why it matters
McLennan is a namesake of the pioneer generation whose arrival transformed central Texas, one of countless immigrants whose names still map the American landscape.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jacob De Cordova
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Jacob De Cordova, born into a Jewish family in Jamaica, immigrated to Philadelphia around 1830 and became one of the great land promoters of frontier Texas. Hired to survey and sell tracts along the Brazos, he brought surveyor George B. Erath here in 1848 to lay out the town of Waco, donating lots for its square, schools, and churches. He died dreaming of industrializing the Brazos Valley and was eventually reinterred in the State Cemetery at Austin.
Elk Community
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The town of West grew from a wave of German and Czech immigrants who turned the McLennan County blackland into productive farms. Among them was August Groppe, Sr., who bought this land in 1874, helped found West's German community, and in 1886 hired local builder Joseph Huber to raise this barn. With its brace-frame timber construction, cross-gabled hay door, and angled cross-shaped opening, it is a fine surviving example of a late-19th-century immigrant farmstead.
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