Wheelock
Wheelock, Robertson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded in 1833 by Colonel E. L. R. Wheelock, soldier, lawyer and educator. One of the organizers of Robertson's colony. Captain of Texas Rangers. Died in Edwardsville, Ill, in 1846 while visiting the place of his birth.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1833 by Colonel E. L. R. Wheelock, this settlement bears the name of a man who wore many hats in early Texas: soldier, lawyer, educator, Texas Ranger captain, and one of the organizers of Robertson's colony. Wheelock helped bring Anglo-American settlers into the region during the turbulent years surrounding Texas independence. He died in 1846 in Illinois, in the town where he had been born, having left his name on the Texas map.
Why it matters
Towns like Wheelock trace the earliest wave of organized Anglo settlement in Texas, the frontier foundation on which the Republic and later the state were built.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · E. L. R. Wheelock
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Wheelock
Wheelock, TX
Surveyor Eleazar Louis Ripley Wheelock came to Texas from Illinois in 1830 and founded a town on his land along the Old San Antonio Road, named Wheelock in 1837. By the 1840s it boasted some twenty businesses and became a Central Texas transportation hub, serving as Robertson County seat from 1850 to 1856. When the railroad bypassed it in the 1860s, the town declined and many residents drifted to nearby Hearne.
Old Cavitt House
Wheelock, TX
The Cavitt homestead began as a log cabin raised in 1836, the year Texas won its independence, and grew into a fine hand-finished house completed in 1854. Standing on the road between Nacogdoches and San Antonio de Béxar, it served through the 1840s and 1850s as a stage stop. The Cavitts were political allies of Sam Houston, who was a frequent guest and gave a desk to Volney Cavitt.
Dunn Cemetery
Wheelock vicinity, TX
This burial ground grew from the homestead of James and Isabella Dunn, part of a group of Irish families who sailed to America in 1821 and, after stints in Charleston and Alabama, made the ox-wagon trek to Sterling C. Robertson's Texas colony in the winter of 1833. The cemetery opened in 1836 with the burial of the Dunns' infant child and has served the pioneer families' descendants ever since.
Shiloh Baptist Church
Franklin, TX
In the antebellum community of Shiloh, established by 1840, seven men and women gathered in August 1854 to organize a Baptist church, part of the frontier Trinity River Association that missionary Z.N. Morrell had helped form in 1848. On land donated by Bryant W. Cobb, the congregation baptized converts in creeks and tanks and grew through generations of founding families before dedicating a new sanctuary at this site in 1955.