Sam Houston Spoke Here
Gilmer, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On this Cherokee Trace site he had visited 25 years earlier, when he lived with the Indians, Sam Houston twice spoke as the leading Texas statesman-- on June 10, 1857, as U. S. Senator, and early in 1861 as governor. At both times he spoke against secession and in favor of the Union.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the tense years before the Civil War, the aging hero of Texas independence returned to a spot along the old Cherokee Trace — ground he had known decades earlier while living among the Cherokee. Speaking here first as a U.S. Senator in 1857 and again as governor in 1861, Sam Houston warned his fellow Texans against leaving the Union, a stand that would soon cost him his office.
Why it matters
Houston's lonely defense of the Union on the eve of secession captures the wrenching divisions that split even the leaders of a Confederate state.
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Related people
- · Sam Houston
Related events
- · Secession crisis of 1861
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cherokee Trace
Gilmer, TX
Around 1821, Cherokee people living near Nacogdoches blazed a trail north toward their kin in Arkansas, guided by a scout who set his course by dragging buffalo skins behind his horse while others marked the trees and planted Cherokee roses still seen along the route. Sam Houston, David Crockett, and thousands of settlers followed this road into Texas. The Cherokee were expelled from Texas in 1839 after Houston left the presidency, their chief killed in a two-day battle on the Neches River.
Upshur County, C. S. A.
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During the Civil War, Upshur County became a busy Confederate supply and training center, its factories in Gilmer and Ore City turning out hats, shoes, saddles, cloth, iron, and pottery for the army while a quartermaster depot coordinated the effort. With the men away at the front, women, children, and the elderly kept the farms producing grain, meat, and cotton. The marker also honors Emma Sansom, the teenaged "sunbonnet heroine" who guided Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry to a hidden ford in Alabama and later settled in Texas.
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Gilmer, TX
During the Civil War this East Texas site hummed with the unglamorous but vital work of keeping an army moving. A shoe factory turned local leather into footgear for Confederate soldiers, while a nearby harness shop produced the bridles, saddles, and rigging that hitched horses and mules to gun carriages, wagons, and ambulances. Fed by a tanyard that processed over 2,000 hides a year, East Texas plants supplied the South hundreds of saddles and harness sets each month.
C. S. A. Hat Factory
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