Planters Bank
Jefferson, Marion County, Texas
Marker Inscription
1852. In Jefferson's heyday, riverfront warehouse of firm with St. Louis, New Orleans branches. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1852, during Jefferson's boom years as a bustling inland riverport, this building served as the warehouse of a mercantile firm with branches in St. Louis and New Orleans. Steamboats reaching Jefferson through Big Cypress Bayou made the town one of the busiest commercial hubs in antebellum Texas. The surviving structure recalls an era when river trade, not rail, ruled the region's economy.
Why it matters
It stands as a relic of the steamboat commerce that briefly made Jefferson one of the great trading gateways of the antebellum Southwest.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jefferson Turn Basin
Jefferson, TX
This wide, deep basin in Cypress Bayou was where steamboats turned around at the end of the Gulf-to-Red River trade. The first steamer, the Lama, reached here in 1844 by threading past the Great Raft, a centuries-old logjam that clogged the Red River above Shreveport and, oddly, made Cypress Bayou the best water route into North Texas, western Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Until the federal government cleared the raft in 1873, Jefferson reigned as the Southwest's greatest inland port—until the last steamer left in 1903.
Texas Statesman Charles Allen Culberson
Jefferson, TX
Charles Allen Culberson practiced law in Jefferson before rising through thirty-two years of Texas public office as attorney general, governor, and U.S. senator. As attorney general he recovered more than two million acres of public land claimed by railroads and backed Governor Hogg's antitrust reforms and the Railroad Commission, later leading the Senate minority and its Judiciary Committee.
Austin Street Mercantile
Jefferson, TX
This brick building rose before 1866, in the years when Jefferson thrived as the greatest inland port in the Southwest, its steamboats reaching the Gulf by way of Big Cypress Bayou. Under one roof it held offices, a grocery, a saloon, and a drugstore. In 1882 it was given to Sallie Harrison as a wedding gift on her marriage to C. A. Culberson, who would later serve as Texas governor and U.S. senator.
Murphy Building
Jefferson, TX
Brothers John C. and James M. Murphy came from Tennessee to the booming riverport of Jefferson in 1850 and built this sturdy structure in the busy warehouse district to serve their wholesale cotton business. As steamboat commerce faded, the building found new life—county offices and courts in 1884, then city hall in 1915, sheltering everything from a volunteer fire company to a dance club. A Diebold safe installed in 1877 still stands inside, a working relic of the town's mercantile heyday.