Site of Sam Houston Speeches
Rusk, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Two speeches were delivered by Sam Houston in Rusk. The first, in 1855, was a debate with politician Frank Bowden. Houston, a U.S. Senator, was on a tour through central and east Texas trying to regain public favor after voting against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Political debates were popular entertainment of the time, and were well attended. Houston campaigned for governor here in 1857. A newspaper account states his speech lasted three hours, but brought little enthusiasm from the crowd. When he finished speaking, applause was weak and many of the benches were empty.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Rusk twice hosted the towering, controversial figure of Sam Houston. In 1855 he debated politician Frank Bowden while trying to win back voters angered by his vote against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and in 1857 he campaigned here for governor to a notably cool reception â a three-hour speech met with weak applause and empty benches. These stops capture Houston at a low ebb, out of step with a Texas drifting toward secession.
Why it matters
Houston's unpopular stands foreshadowed the sectional crisis, and stump debates like these were the raucous democratic theater of antebellum American politics.
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Related people
- ¡ Sam Houston
- ¡ Frank Bowden
Related events
- ¡ Kansas-Nebraska Act debate
- ¡ 1857 Texas gubernatorial campaign
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Rusk
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In 1853, when Rusk was a young East Texas town, a small band of Baptist worshippers gathered in a private home to organize a congregation, at first sharing a Union Church with local Presbyterians. Over the following decades the fellowship moved, merged with a neighboring congregation, and raised successively larger sanctuaries, from an 1892 one-room frame church to a three-story building in the 1920s. Its story mirrors the slow maturing of a frontier settlement into an established community.
First Presbyterian Church of Rusk
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Presbyterian worship in Rusk began in 1847, just a year after the town's founding, when the Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized with only four members. A separate 'Old School' congregation dated to 1831 and built its own sanctuary in 1854. The two united in 1906 as the First Presbyterian Church, and in 1913-14 raised the town's first brick church, sustained across the decades by the labors of its Ladies' Aid Society.
Cherokee County
Rusk, TX
When Spanish and French explorers reached this region in the seventeenth century, they found Tejas and Hasinai peoples living here, and the Spanish planted missions among them. The Cherokee, driven from the United States, migrated to the area around 1822 and were present during early Anglo colonization before President Mirabeau B. Lamar's administration expelled them in 1839. Formally created from Nacogdoches County in 1846, Cherokee County filled quickly with farms and towns and has since produced two Texas governors, a Wyoming governor, and a Texas House speaker.
First United Methodist Church of Rusk
Rusk, TX
Organized in 1849, only a few years after Texas joined the Union, this Methodist congregation in Rusk was first served by circuit-riding minister Henderson D. Palmer, who had been licensed to preach in Nacogdoches County in 1838. Three successive sanctuaries have stood on the same site, from the first frame building of 1851 to the present structure completed in 1920. For well over a century the congregation has anchored community life in this Cherokee County seat.