Van Zandt Hill
Marshall, Harrison County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Homesite of Isaac Van Zandt (1813-1847), one of founders of Marshall, a noted frontiersman, debater, lawyer, statesman; served in 5th and 6th congresses of Republic of Texas; was Charge d'Affaires to United States, 1842-1844. In governor's race when he died of yellow fever and was buried in family graveyard. Now in Greenwood Cemetery. This 100 acre Van Zandt tract was bought from heirs in 1912 by College of Marshall founders. First classes met in June, 1917. In 1944 the college was raised to senior rank and renamed East Texas Baptist College. Incise in base: Erected by senior class, 1967, on 55th anniversary of college.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Isaac Van Zandt was one of the young Republic of Texas's most capable men — a lawyer, legislator, and diplomat who served as chargé d'affaires to the United States during the delicate years before annexation. His campaign for governor was cut short in 1847 when yellow fever killed him, and he was buried in the family plot on this Marshall hilltop. Decades later the land became the campus of the College of Marshall, which grew into East Texas Baptist College.
Why it matters
Van Zandt helped steer Texas from an independent republic toward statehood, and the reuse of his homestead for a college shows how frontier ground became the seedbed of enduring institutions.
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Related people
- · Isaac Van Zandt
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Grover Cemetery
Marshall, TX
In 1848 William McKinney gave land here for a community school, later joined by a Union church, and the spot became the heart of the far-flung Grover farm settlement. The cemetery appears in records by the 1850s, its oldest marked grave that of Susan Green, a Tennessee migrant who died in 1875. Grover faded in the 1920s and its school and church were gone by 1930, leaving the burial ground as the settlement's last physical trace.
Ewing Chapel Cemetery
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In a quiet corner of southern Harrison County, this cemetery took shape when the Ewing Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church organized in January 1855, though its earliest confirmed burial dates to 1853. It holds many of the area's first settlers, at least fourteen men who formed volunteer units during the Civil War, early physicians, and the community's first schoolteachers. Annual reunion days drew descendants back to honor their ancestors from the 1870s into the 1940s.
Marshall Hall
Marshall, TX
Marshall Hall is the oldest building on the campus of what is now East Texas Baptist University, born of a 1912 community drive to establish a Southern Baptist college in East Texas. Trustees bought 100 acres of the former Van Zandt plantation, and Waco architect George Burnett designed the four-story hall in a blend of Jacobean-Tudor and neoclassical styles, promising a structure "thoroughly modern and strictly fireproof." Completed in 1916 and occupied by students in 1917, it housed offices, laboratories, a library, gymnasium, and chapel-theater.
East Texas Baptist University
Marshall, TX
Marshall had schooled its children in private academies since the 1840s when, at a 1911 banquet, Baptist pastor William T. Tardy challenged local Methodists to help start a college—and they promised support if the Baptists would build one. The College of Marshall opened as a junior college in 1912 on land carved from the old Van Zandt plantation, growing to some 300 students by 1918. Renamed East Texas Baptist College in 1944 and university in 1984, it still serves East Texas today.