Pleasant Williams Kittrell
Huntsville, Walker County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(April 13, 1805 - September 29, 1867) Doctor Pleasant Williams Kittrell, a statesman in North Carolina and Alabama, moved with his family to Texas in 1850. While serving two terms in the Texas Legislature, the doctor authored the bill to establish the University of Texas. Though the bill was signed in 1858, the university's opening was delayed until 1883. At home in Huntsville, Kittrell managed his extensive land holdings and practiced medicine. He treated area victims of the 1867 yellow fever epidemic until he himself succumbed to the disease. Kittrell is buried near his good friends Sam Houston (in whose former home Kittrell died) and historian Henderson Yoakum. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dr. Pleasant Williams Kittrell arrived in Huntsville in 1850 already a seasoned statesman from North Carolina and Alabama, and he made his mark on Texas from the legislature. There he authored the bill establishing the University of Texas — signed in 1858, though the school would not open until 1883. A friend and physician to Sam Houston, Kittrell died tending patients during the 1867 yellow fever epidemic that took him too.
Why it matters
He helped lay the legislative cornerstone of one of the nation's great public universities, and his death embodies the physician's sacrifice in an age before modern medicine.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Dr. Pleasant Williams Kittrell moved his family to Texas in 1850, he arrived in a state only five years into its life within the Union, still young and still building the institutions that a settled society requires. Born in 1805, he came already seasoned — a man who had been a statesman in North Carolina and Alabama before turning westward to make a new life in Huntsville.
The 1850s in Texas were a decade of ambition and growth. Leaders across the young state were debating how to educate its people, develop its land, and establish the enduring public institutions of a maturing commonwealth. It was a moment when the decisions of legislators could shape generations to come.
Huntsville itself was a town of real consequence in this era, home to notable Texans and a center of political and civic life. It was a fitting place for a physician-statesman to settle, manage his affairs, and take up a role in the great questions of his adopted state.
People & events
Kittrell did not set his public life aside when he reached Texas. Serving two terms in the state legislature, he authored the bill to establish the University of Texas — a piece of legislation aimed at giving the state a great public university of its own. The bill was signed in 1858, though events would delay the university's actual opening until 1883, well after Kittrell's death.
At home in Huntsville, he lived the full life of a leading citizen, managing extensive land holdings and continuing to practice medicine. He kept notable company: the marker remembers him as a good friend of Sam Houston, and records that Kittrell would ultimately die in Houston's former home.
That death came in the line of a physician's duty. When a yellow fever epidemic struck the area in 1867, Kittrell treated the stricken — until he contracted the disease himself and died on September 29, 1867. He was buried near two men he had known in life: Sam Houston, and the historian Henderson Yoakum, whose work chronicled the story of Texas. In death as in life, Kittrell rests among the figures who helped shape his state.
Its place in the American story
Kittrell's great legislative achievement connects this modest Huntsville memorial to one of the largest stories in American life: the rise of the great public university. By authoring the bill that established the University of Texas, he helped lay a cornerstone for an institution that would one day educate hundreds of thousands — an enduring public good born from a single legislator's foresight, even if its doors opened only a quarter-century later.
His death speaks to another national story — the peril of epidemic disease in nineteenth-century America. In an age before the cause of yellow fever was understood, physicians who stayed to treat the sick placed themselves in mortal danger. Kittrell's decision to keep tending patients until the fever took him embodies a professional courage that countless doctors showed in the era's recurring epidemics.
Together these two threads — the builder of institutions and the physician who died at his post — make Kittrell a figure in whom civic ambition and personal sacrifice meet, each a recognizably American virtue.
If you visit
Come to this Huntsville memorial with two very different legacies in mind. One is grand and enduring: the man remembered here helped set in motion a major public university, and it is worth pausing over the long gap between the 1858 signing and the school's 1883 opening — a reminder that the institutions we take for granted often took decades to become real.
The other legacy is intimate and sobering. This is also the resting place of a doctor who died caring for his neighbors during an epidemic, and Huntsville's association with figures like Sam Houston and the historian Henderson Yoakum places Kittrell in remarkable company. Standing here, you are among the people who helped write early Texas history.
Huntsville rewards the history-minded traveler, and this memorial fits naturally into a day spent exploring the town's deep past. Take a quiet moment to consider a life that gave Texas both a university's foundation and a physician's ultimate sacrifice — two gifts from one citizen, remembered on a single stone.
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
- · Pleasant Williams Kittrell
- · Sam Houston
- · Henderson Yoakum
Related events
- · 1867 yellow fever epidemic
Themes & tags
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