William Jefferson Jones
Texas City, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(September 27, 1810 - May 5, 1897) Virginia native William Jefferson Jones received his license to practice law at age 19. He was an associate of Mirabeau B. Lamar, future president of the Republic of Texas, in a Georgia newspaper enterprise. Urged by Lamar to move to Texas, Jones traveled to Galveston in 1837 and in 1839 joined Lamar's military campaign to remove the Cherokee Indians from East Texas. Chosen as associate justice to the Texas Republic's first Supreme Court about 1840, Jones would later render the court's second decision. He married Elizabeth Giberson in 1841 and moved to Columbus in Colorado County to serve as district judge. He retired about 1852 and came to Virginia Point where he became the first person to successfully harvest valuable sea-island cotton in Texas and make use of its cottonseed oil. With William R. Smith in 1853, and again with his son, Walter C., in 1885, Jones produced plans for a city at Virginia Point. Although his proposals failed he is nevertheless credited with being among the first to envision the potential for a deep water port city on Galveston's mainland. Jones, whose generous land terms led to the development of La Marque's post-Civil War African American Highland Station community, is buried in Galveston's Lakeview Cemetery.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
A Virginia-born prodigy licensed to practice law at nineteen, William Jefferson Jones came to Texas in 1837 at the urging of Mirabeau B. Lamar and served as an associate justice on the Republic's first Supreme Court. He joined Lamar's 1839 campaign to expel the Cherokee from East Texas, later pioneered sea-island cotton and cottonseed oil on the mainland, and drew up early plans for a deep-water port at Virginia Point. His generous land terms helped seed La Marque's African American Highland Station community after the Civil War.
Why it matters
Jones's long life links the founding of the Republic's judiciary, the displacement of Native peoples, and the postwar rise of a Black community—the tangled strands of Texas's transformation into a modern state.
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Related people
- · William Jefferson Jones
- · Mirabeau B. Lamar
- · Elizabeth Giberson
Related events
- · Cherokee removal from East Texas
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Settlement Community
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During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people founded a community on land that Judge William J. Jones platted for sale to freedmen near the Gulf Coast. Many had been brought to the area by cattlemen, and after the war some stayed on as cowboys for the Butler Ranch while building their own settlement, a church and a school by 1871. Proud of owning land and their freedom, residents called the place "Our Settlement"; it prospered into the early 1900s with an unusually high literacy rate before industry, integration and incorporation into Texas City gradually dispersed it.
Greater Bell Zion Missionary Baptist Church
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In the years after the Civil War, a group of African Americans — many of them Black cowboys who worked the Chisholm Trail — bought land in central Galveston County to build a community. Their Baptist church, founded in 1885 by the Rev. Israel S. Campbell, an escaped slave known as the "Father of Black Texas Baptists," became the settlement's backbone. It changed names with its pastors over the years and, from an early school begun in 1874, long served as a place of both worship and learning.
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Around 1821 the privateer and War of 1812 veteran James Campbell — a lieutenant and close friend of the buccaneer Jean Lafitte at Galveston — put the sea behind him to settle here as a rancher. He had earlier taken a bride, Mary Sabinal, in Karankawa ceremony, and the couple raised their community on this coastal ground. The settlement endured until a hurricane destroyed it a second time in 1915, and the Campbells lie with other early Texans in the nearby cemetery.
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