HistoricSiteMarkers
Early RepublicCivil War

Plantation Home of Edwin Waller 1800--1883

Hempsted, Waller County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Plantation Home of Edwin Waller (1800-1883). Member of the consultation in 1835. Signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. First mayor of the City of Austin. Member of the Secession Convention in 1861. On this property, acquired during the Republic, he resided from 1846 for many years.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Edwin Waller lived on this Hempstead-area property, acquired during the Republic, from 1846 for many years. His public life bracketed the era's great turning points: a member of the 1835 Consultation and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he went on to serve as the first mayor of Austin. In 1861 he sat as a member of the Secession Convention, tying his long career to Texas's entry into the Civil War.

Why it matters

Waller's life links the founding of the Republic of Texas to the secession crisis a generation later, embodied in one homestead the county itself is named for.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Edwin Waller

Related events

  • · Texas Declaration of Independence
  • · Texas Secession Convention

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Amos Gates

Washington, TX

Amos Gates, born in 1799, was among the settlers of Stephen F. Austin's first colony, the "Old Three Hundred" generation that established Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. This marker also remembers his son William C. Gates, born in 1834, who served in the Confederate army before his death in 1877. Together they span the colony's founding and the Civil War era at Washington, cradle of Texas independence.

Hughey Chapel Cemetery

Stoneham, TX

The family of Jefferson Edmond Hughey settled a 260-acre homestead in this part of Grimes County by 1859. They laid out a family cemetery whose earliest marked grave, that of Hughey's mother-in-law Mary Ann Garmany Boozer, dates to 1876, and built a nearby chapel that doubled as the community schoolhouse. The land stayed in Hughey hands until 1989, and the burial ground—home to Confederate veterans' graves—still marks the region's earliest settlers.

Concord Cemetery

Kenney, TX

In the farmland of northern Austin County, Concord Cemetery opened in 1870 as the burial ground of the Concord Christian Church, its earliest grave holding a Confederate veteran and early settler. Around it gathered the pioneer families—Collins, Creath, McNutt and others—who had reached Texas in the 1830s, one of them serving with the baggage guard at San Jacinto. Confederate, Civil War and World War I veterans lie beneath its varied stones, a record of a rural community across a century of life. After decades of neglect, descendants cleared the overgrown grounds in 2010.

First United Methodist Church of Hempstead

Hempstead, TX

Methodism took hold in Hempstead around 1857, just after the town was platted, and an 1859 revival swelled the young congregation enough to acquire a building for worship. Formally deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1883, the congregation raised a succession of sanctuaries and served as one of the town's central gathering places. Through mergers and renamings it became today's First United Methodist Church of Hempstead.