Upshur County, C. S. A.

🏛️The era

When Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861, East Texas was cotton country with a large enslaved population, tied by economics and politics to the Deep South. Upshur County, in the Piney Woods, was part of that world. As the war dragged on and the Union blockade tightened, the Confederacy had to make much of what it needed at home.

For that reason, interior counties like Upshur became important. Far from the fighting fronts, they could host training camps, workshops and supply depots. According to the marker, factories in Gilmer and Ore City turned out hats, shoes, saddles, harness, cloth, iron and pottery. The area's iron ore deposits made local ironworking possible, and a Confederate Quartermaster Depot was set up here.

The home front carried a heavy load. With so many men away, the farms that fed the army were kept running by women, older men, children, and the enslaved people whose forced labor underpinned the entire Southern economy. The marker describes enslaved people as "loyal," a phrase typical of memorials from the mid-twentieth century. Historians today recognize that enslaved people's labor was compelled, not volunteered, and that many seized chances to escape or resist when the war made them possible.

👥People & events

The marker's most dramatic story took place far from Texas, in northern Alabama, in the spring of 1863. A Union cavalry force was on a raid aimed at cutting Confederate supply lines, and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was chasing it. On May 2, 1863, the marker says, Forrest and about 600 cavalrymen were pursuing roughly 1,700 Federal troops when they reached Black Creek near Gadsden. The retreating Union soldiers had burned the bridge.

Forrest asked the locals about another way across, and a 15-year-old girl named Emma Sansom offered to show him a little-known ford. The general pulled her up onto his horse behind him. According to the marker, bullets passed through her calico dress as they rode, and she waved her bonnet defiantly while pointing out the crossing. Forrest's troopers crossed and kept up the chase, and the Union force was captured. That surrender is well documented and came the next day in Georgia.

The Confederacy honored Emma Sansom. Forrest wrote her a note of thanks, the Confederate Congress awarded her a gold medal, and a poem, "The Ballad of Emma Sansom," made her a Southern heroine. She married a Confederate veteran, C. B. Johnson, and moved to Texas in 1876. She died in 1900 and is buried in Little Mound Cemetery, about eleven miles west of this marker. The marker also lists the Texas units that rode with Forrest.

It is worth knowing more about the general in this story. Forrest was one of the Confederacy's most gifted cavalry commanders. Before the war he was a slave trader, his troops carried out the massacre of Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in 1864, and after the war he was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Emma Sansom's own act was one of youthful courage, but the man she helped carries a much darker record.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The marker shows how much the Confederate war effort depended on its home front. Armies needed shoes, saddles, cloth and food as much as soldiers. When the blockade cut off imports, places like Upshur County became the South's arsenal and pantry. And the whole system rested on enslaved labor, the same institution the Confederacy was formed to protect.

The marker is also a piece of history in its own right. This series of Texas Civil War markers was placed in the mid-twentieth century, when the "Lost Cause" view of the war was widely taught. That view pictured the Confederacy as noble, enslaved people as contented, and wartime sacrifice as the main story. The "loyal slaves" wording, and the celebration of Forrest without mention of his record, reflect that era's version of memory.

Reading it today, you can see two stories at once. One is the real hardship and courage of ordinary people on the home front and on the battlefield. The other is how later generations chose to remember a war fought to preserve slavery. Both are part of the American story.

🧭If you visit

Gilmer is the seat of Upshur County, set among the pines and red-clay hills of East Texas. As you stand at the marker, think about how busy this quiet country was in wartime. Workshops turned out goods for the army, training camps drilled recruits, and farm families worked fields for a distant war.

If you want to go further, Little Mound Cemetery, where Emma Sansom Johnson is buried, lies about eleven miles west, according to the marker. Visiting a grave like hers connects you to the larger war. A frightened, brave teenager's single afternoon in Alabama ended up in a quiet Texas churchyard.

This marker fits well into a road trip through East Texas history, which takes in old courthouse towns, Piney Woods back roads and Civil War sites across the region. Go with open eyes. Read the marker both as a record of the past it describes and as evidence of how Texans in the twentieth century chose to remember that past.