Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham
Weatherford, Parker County, Texas
Marker Inscription
S.W.T. Lanham was born on July 4, 1846 to James and Louisa (Tucker) Lanham in South Carolina. He joined the Confederate Army in 1861, serving in the Third South Carolina Infantry, and was wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, 1864. He wed Sarah Meng in 1866, and they moved to north Texas, relocating in 1868 to Weatherford, where he became a lawyer. He gained notoriety as a district attorney in the Warren Wagontrain Raid cases, and he served five terms as U.S. Congressman between 1882 and 1903. He began his first of two terms as Governor in 1902. Lanham retired to Weatherford in 1907 and served as a University of Texas regent. He died in 1908. (2006)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham carried his life across the great fault line of 19th-century America: a South Carolina teenager who enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 and was wounded at Spotsylvania, then a young lawyer who rebuilt in postwar Weatherford. From the Texas bench and the courtroom of the Warren Wagontrain Raid cases he rose to five terms in Congress and two terms as governor of Texas beginning in 1902.
Why it matters
Lanham was the last Confederate veteran to serve as governor of Texas, embodying how the defeated South's generation carried on into the leadership of the Gilded Age republic it had once fought.
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Related people
- · S.W.T. Lanham
- · Sarah Meng
Related events
- · Battle of Spotsylvania Court House
- · Warren Wagontrain Raid
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old City Greenwood Cemetery
Weatherford, TX
Formally established by Weatherford's town council in 1863, this cemetery gathered earlier burials that had been scattered in the town's unmarked streets. By the 1920s a civic league and cemetery association—led notably by its women members—had beautified and secured the neglected grounds. Among its estimated thousand graves rest Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Chester Bowen, famed trail drivers Oliver Loving and Bose Ikard, and Texas Governor S. W. T. Lanham.
Parker County, C.S.A.
Weatherford, TX
Created in 1855 on land once granted to Stephen F. Austin and S.M. Williams, Parker County had barely settled before the Civil War split it, voting 535 to 61 for secession in 1861. Its men supplied Confederate beef, rode against frequent Comanche and Kiowa raids, and sent nine companies to the war, while local rancher John R. Baylor even became Confederate governor of Arizona.
Governor S.W.T. Lanham
Weatherford, TX
Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham volunteered at fifteen and fought through the Civil War before settling in Texas, teaching school, and rising through the law to become a five-county district attorney and then a long-serving U.S. congressman for West Texas. His fame took root in 1871 with his fiery prosecution of Kiowa chiefs after the Warren Wagon Train Massacre. As the last Confederate veteran to serve as governor of Texas, from 1903 to 1907, he championed reforms in taxes, child labor, uniform textbooks, and honest elections — and died at this home in Weatherford.
Soldier Spring Park
Weatherford, TX
Confederate soldiers are said to have camped by this inviting spring during the 1860s, and in 1890 veterans returned to hold their twenty-fifth reunion here. The following year, 55 acres were set aside as Soldier Spring Park, which went on to host Chautauqua programs, circuses, reunions, and even a public hanging in 1908. After decades of neglect—serving as the city dump and then a caliche mine—the grounds were reclaimed as a park in 1973.