Search Markers

Post, TX

In the drought-stricken years of 1911-1914, cereal magnate C. W. Post waged what he called "rain battles" on the Texas Caprock, detonating dynamite in hopes of jolting moisture from the sky. Inspired by reports that downpours often followed Civil War cannonades, he first hoisted charges aloft on kites before switching to ground blasts along the escarpment. The costly experiments — some $50,000 spent — were later judged only partly effective, but Post kept at them until his death.

Mineola, TX

Cadwell Walton Raines (1839–1906) packed several careers into one Texas life — Methodist preacher, teacher, lawyer, newspaper publisher, county judge, and finally state librarian. A Georgia native who came to Texas in 1853 and served in the Confederate army, he founded The Mineola Hawkeye in 1880 at the urging of his friend, future governor James Stephen Hogg. As state librarian from the 1890s until his death, Raines built the library's Texana collection, wrote reference works, and helped found the Texas State Historical Association.

Georgetown, TX

Born in Prussian Thorn—today Torun, Poland—Christian Augustus Daniel Clamp came to Texas in 1846 and settled in Georgetown in 1851. A skilled carpenter and cabinetmaker, he became one of the young town's foremost builders, raising homes, stores, churches, and public buildings, and ran a furniture business on this block for years. An active Presbyterian and civic leader, he also served as mayor from 1878 to 1880.

Georgetown, TX

Belford Lumber Co. built this house in 1915 for real estate businessman Charles Byron Atkinson and his wife Lilburn, daughter of a prominent Georgetown family. C.B. died young, just five years after the home's completion, and Lilburn kept the house until 1976. An outstanding Craftsman bungalow, it features an inset gabled porch, cobblestone piers and chimney, a three-sided window bay, bracketed eaves, and a low overhanging roofline.

Lampasas, TX

Built in 1883 in the young Hill Country town of Lampasas, this house reflects the craftsmanship of its era with beaded wainscoting and carved beveled glass. From 1913 to 1927 it served as a Methodist parsonage, tying the residence to the religious life of a growing central Texas community. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Georgetown, TX

Claude Carr Cody, a Georgia-born mathematician, spent 37 years at Southwestern University, becoming so central to the school that he was called its 'Grand Old Man.' In 1883 he married Mattie Hughes, whose father, a judge and legislator, gave the couple this lot, and by 1897 they had completed a Free Classic Queen Anne home distinguished by Doric columns, an octagonal bay, and an oval window.

Marshall, TX

Born in Marshall in 1863, Cornelius Granberry Lancaster studied architecture at Texas A&M and returned home to design many of his town's landmarks, from the Ginnochio Hotel to city hall and the Elks Club. In 1895 he partnered with San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon on the Beaux-Arts Harrison County courthouse, and over his long career his work traced the shifting fashions of American architecture from Richardsonian Romanesque to Classical Revival. The Depression forced his practice to close in 1939, after which he supervised WPA projects in Dallas until his death in 1947.

Canyon, TX

Charles Richard Burrow came to Canyon City in 1899 to clerk at Eagle Hardware and by 1919 owned it outright, renaming it Burrow Lumber Company. A mayor, city commissioner, and president of the state lumbermen's association, he also quietly funded the educations of many students at what became West Texas A&M University. In 1911 architect O. G. Roquemore designed this two-story Craftsman bungalow for Burrow and his wife Bula, with dormers, exposed rafter ends, and brick porch columns.

Van, TX

Charles Sparkman Nicks was a Tennessee-born photographer and tinkerer who devised gas-measuring devices and a portable darkroom before the 1929 crash wiped out his savings. Seeking work, he opened a studio in Van, Texas, just as oil was discovered nearby in 1929–1930. As the only professional photographer on the scene, Nicks documented the derricks, oil-field fires, and boom-town crowds that transformed the town.

La Pryor, TX

Founded in the spring of 1862, this Confederate frontier post guarded the crossing of the Nueces on the San Antonio-Eagle Pass Road, a lifeline that carried Southern cotton south to Mexico and manufactured goods north to the Confederacy. Manned by the frontier regiment under Col. James M. Norris, it was one of a chain of camps set a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Short of food, horses, and guns and under constant threat of raids, the men here found little of war's glory and much of its hardship.

Circleville, TX

During the Civil War, a factory near this site on the San Gabriel River made cotton cards—the stiff wire brushes needed to turn raw cotton into batts for spinning—between 1862 and 1865. With the Union blockade choking trade, Texans could no longer swap cotton bales for finished cloth and had to make textiles at home, importing scarce cards through neutral Mexico at steep prices. Chartered by Confederate Texas and owned by Joseph Eubank, Jr., the factory was part of Governor Lubbock's push to re-tool the state's farm economy for war, as Texas became a storehouse of supplies for the Confederacy.

Kendalia, TX

George Wilkins Kendall (1809–1867) learned printing in the Northeast before co-founding the New Orleans Picayune in 1837. Riding with the Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, he filed dispatches that made him one of the world's first war correspondents, and his columns tirelessly promoted Texas to readers as far away as the Sandwich Islands. Settling on a Kendall County sheep range, he produced wool for Confederate uniforms and blankets during the Civil War while fighting Comanches, fires, and freezes to keep his flocks.

Cherokee County, TX

This site once held some of the more than 3,000 Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Mansfield, Louisiana, on April 8, 1864, when Confederate forces turned back the Federal Red River Campaign aimed at invading Texas. Overflow from Camp Ford at Tyler—the largest prisoner-of-war camp west of the Mississippi—these men were part of the vast logistical problem of holding captives in a resource-thin corner of the Confederacy. The marker anchors one node in a network of Texas prison camps far from the war's famous battlefields.

Lometa, TX

West of here on the Colorado River, brine springs long used by Native people as a healing resort were turned to industry during the Civil War. Workers pumped brine with a horse-driven lift onto a forty-foot scaffold, where cedar boughs concentrated it before iron kettles boiled it down—about one bushel of salt from fifty of brine. The salt supplied the Confederate army's men, cavalry horses, and mule teams, along with ranch and table needs.

Buchanan Dam, TX

During the Civil War, brine welling up from ancient Cambrian sea deposits fed a salt works between Tow Valley and Old Bluffton, where a day's boiling in a hundred 250-gallon iron kettles yielded twenty to thirty bushels. The precious salt cured meat and hides, seasoned tables, and fed cavalry horses across a Texas cut off from coastal supply. The busy site also hosted Llano County's first district court and a nearby stagecoach stop before Lake Buchanan drowned it in 1935.

Concan, TX

During the Civil War the Confederacy was chronically short of gunpowder, and inventive locals turned to whatever nitrate sources they could find. Here in the Texas Hill Country, workers mined the deep deposits of bat guano inside a vast limestone cave, extracting saltpetre — the essential ingredient of black powder — and combining it with sulphur and charcoal. A narrow-gauge railway with mule-drawn cars carried the diggings out of chambers so large that one room measured hundreds of feet across, with the mules themselves stabled underground.

Wimberley, TX

Clarence W. Burdett helped build his family's store in Wimberley in 1932, hauling in native and colored stone, and with his wife Pansy founded Camp Waloa, the area's first girls camp. Though he lived in the Hill Country town only eighteen years, he left a deep mark, raising some fifty rock homes along Wood Creek plus dams and spring boxes. Recognizing Wimberley's appeal to visitors, he subdivided land along Lone Man Creek and built rock cabins for wealthy Houston vacationers, three of which still stand.

Washington, DC · est. 1928

Built around 1835, this small stone dwelling housed the keeper of the eastern terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where the waterway met Tiber Creek and the Potomac near the growing capital. In the canal era, lock keepers collected tolls and worked the gates that floated boats laden with coal and goods toward Washington.

Concord, NC

Erected in memory of the Confederate dead of Cabarrus County, this monument marks the years 1861–1865 with the solemn language of granite, marble, and the cypress branch, an old emblem of mourning. Like hundreds of courthouse-square monuments across the South, it was raised by a community determined to honor its war dead and to shape how the Civil War would be remembered. It stands today as both a memorial and a document of that memory.

Nordheim, TX

In the 1870s Virginian Joshua Butler settled 2,000 acres along Cabeza Creek, and neighboring ranchers soon ran large sheep and cattle operations across the DeWitt County range. A schoolhouse doubled as a place of Baptist and Methodist worship, and by the 1880s the village had a doctor, stores, a cotton gin, and a blacksmith. The post office closed in 1907, and as ranches gave way to small farms and schools consolidated, the community faded.

Goliad, TX

For nearly a century this ford on a San Antonio River tributary carried travelers along the La Bahía–Bexar road, a branch of the Spanish Camino Real linking the Gulf presidios to Bexar and, ultimately, to Mexico City. After the Presidio La Bahía and Mission Espíritu Santo resettled nearby in 1749, the crossing became a working artery for soldiers, ranchers, and traders, charted by Spanish captains and later mapped by Stephen F. Austin and the naturalist Berlandier. German immigrants of the 1840s followed the same ruts to new homes, until the railroads finally rendered the old road obsolete.

Round Rock, TX

Built in the early 1850s of squared logs and hand-hewn limestone, this sturdy cabin once stood near the village of Gabriel Mills on land settled by miller and blacksmith Samuel Mather. Before it became a family dwelling, it served the young community as a shared space for church services, schooling, and Masonic lodge meetings. Donated to Georgetown and restored as a community project, it survives as a monument to local pioneer life.

Arlington, TX

This full-scale replica derrick honors the cable-tool rigs that punched Texas's early deep wells in the boom years after World War I. Its rigging mirrors the equipment used in 1920 to bring in the Crowley No. 1 near Breckenridge, a 250-barrel producer struck at 3,500 feet—among the deepest wells of its day.

Caddo, TX

When Joe Schoolcraft settled on Caddo Creek in 1860, fewer than 200 people lived in all of Stephens County. Over the following decades the town gathered a post office, schoolhouse, churches, doctors, and even telephone service, its economy resting on cattle, cotton, and sheep. Then oil struck in 1916, and by 1919 Caddo led the state in production, drawing thousands before the boom faded, the highway bypassed town, and the population dwindled to fewer than 50.

Mount Pleasant, TX

For more than a thousand years, the Caddo peoples occupied a homeland spanning parts of present-day Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, building complex societies with ceremonial mound centers and sophisticated farming as early as A.D. 800. Early Spanish and French visitors recorded their customs and prized trade, but European diseases and later Anglo-American settlement devastated the population, and by the late 1850s the Caddo were forced to Indian Territory. Archaeologists studying village sites along Cypress Creek continue to recover the story of Caddo life from pottery, mounds, and burial patterns.

Mineola, TX

Beginning in the ninth century, the Caddo — allied peoples with distinct dialects and customs — built complex societies along the rivers of present-day Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas, sustained by wide trade networks, advanced agriculture, and elaborate ritual. When Europeans arrived in the 1540s they recorded a name meaning 'Real Chief,' and locally it was the Hasinai who lived along the Sabine. Pressured by American settlement, the Caddo left their ancestral homeland by the 1840s, and archaeological sites in the Mineola Nature Preserve still preserve the pottery, tools, and mounds of a thousand years of habitation.

Lone Oak, TX

Long before European settlers arrived, the river valleys of present-day northeast Texas and its neighboring states were home to the ancestors of the Caddo, a sophisticated society of farmers, potters, traders, and priests. Skilled agriculturalists who had spread through the East Texas Piney Woods by around 500 AD, they lived in distinctive beehive-shaped grass homes and were renowned for their pottery and bow making. Artifacts found in Hunt County point to a Caddoan presence here between roughly 800 and 1700 AD. Even the name 'Texas' echoes their word 'Tayshas,' meaning friends or allies.

Daingerfield, TX

The Caddo Trace was an ancient hunting and trade path worn by the Caddo people who lived in the northeast corner of what became Texas. Like many Indigenous routes, it was later taken over by newcomers, becoming part of stage and mail lines after 1840 and a road for teamsters and marching soldiers. It touched or crossed the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Trammel's traces, and modern state highways still trace its course.

Burkeville, TX

In the depths of the Great Depression, Newton County officials paired local materials with federal Work Projects Administration wages to build this structure in 1940–41, putting men to work while bringing county services closer to the area's residents. Named for Harriet Trotti Cade, who donated the land, it served as a sub-courthouse and town hall, its walls raised from hand-shaped native sandstone and lumber milled in nearby Wiergate. The building and its rock wall are a handsome record of Depression-era public works.

Streetman, TX

The Cade community sprang up in the 1870s across the farmland where Navarro and Freestone counties meet, named for early resident Cade Hayes. Its cemetery opened in 1876 and the settlers built a church and Masonic hall on land deeded by the Coleman family. When a rail line bypassed the area in the early 1900s, Cade faded, but local women revived and still tend the burial ground.

Ingram, TX

Alabama native Guilford Marion Cade served as a doctor in the Confederate Army before moving to Texas in 1865 and, in 1883, bringing his family to Kerr County. After a storm destroyed the family's log cabin, his son built a frame house, and in the early 1930s a grandson and great-grandson raised this two-story stone house on a high hill — its irregular rubble masonry doubling as a demonstration model for the builder's carpentry clients.

Town of Highlands, NY

This monument at West Point sets in stone the Cadet Honor Code of the United States Military Academy: that a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The academy, founded on the Hudson in 1802, built its reputation on binding future officers to a standard of integrity as demanding as its training in arms. The code's stark simplicity has made it a defining creed for generations of graduates.

Beeville, TX

Organized in 1877 as Lapara Baptist Church, this congregation of 32 charter members first worshipped under a brush arbor and in a schoolhouse before raising a sanctuary on Lapara Creek. In 1920 the building was moved here and the church renamed for the Cadiz settlement, growing and enlarging over the decades. By 1960 it had earned recognition as Rural Church of the Year.

Canton, TX

Georgia-born Cadwell Walton Raines came to Texas in 1858 and served in R.M. Gano's Texas Cavalry during the Civil War before turning to teaching, law, and journalism. As Van Zandt County judge he was caught up in the county's turbulent 1877 County Seat War, and he later published newspapers in several East Texas towns. Appointed State Librarian in 1891 by his friend Governor James Stephen Hogg, he rebuilt the neglected library and assembled its foundational collection of Texana before his death in 1906.

Stephenville, TX

Merchant, rancher, and banker J.H. Cage bought this Stephenville property in 1876, and after his death his children built this house in 1913 for their mother, Janie. Designed by the noted Fort Worth firm of Sanguinet & Staats, it blends Colonial Revival styling with Prairie School touches, showing off beveled glass, two-story brick piers, and octagonal columns. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1983.

Alvarado, TX

Nancy and Aquilla Cahill settled this Johnson County land in 1859, and the farming community that gathered around them took the family name. In 1893, Sarah E. Snodgrass deeded ground for a Methodist church and cemetery in memory of her father, Aquilla, and members built a sanctuary and open-air tabernacle served by circuit-riding preachers. The church long stood as the gathering place for a wide stretch of rural country.

Collinsville, IL · est. 1982

The Mississippian people built a sophisticated urban center of plazas, mounds, and a solar calendar of timber posts. Cahokia was larger than London at the time before declining by 1350.

Peebles, OH

In September 1957, the rolling farmland of Adams County, Ohio, hosted the 5th World Plowing Contest and the World's Conservation Exposition — a Cold War–era gathering that drew plowmen and agricultural experts from around the globe to a region then at the forefront of the American soil-conservation movement. Competitors guided their tractors and teams across the fields in a contest that was as much about camaraderie between nations as skill in the furrow, and a stone cairn was raised to mark the occasion. The event celebrated stewardship of the land at a time when conservation farming was reshaping how America treated its worn and eroded soils.

Town of Cairo, NY

Raised by the townspeople of Cairo, New York, this memorial honors the local men who served in the First World War between 1917 and 1919. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, small towns across the country sent their sons overseas to the trenches of France, and communities like Cairo felt the war's cost keenly. In the years after the Armistice, hundreds of such monuments went up on village greens and courthouse lawns, funded by neighbors determined that the service would not be forgotten. This marker is Cairo's own expression of that grief and pride.

Del Rio, TX

In 1911, chasing a $50,000 Hearst prize for the first transcontinental flight in 30 days, aviator Cal Rodgers set out from Long Island in a Wright Flyer christened the Vin Fiz after the grape soda that sponsored him. Underpowered against western mountains, he swung south into Texas, trailed by a support train carrying spare parts and his wife. When he landed at Del Rio on October 26, schools let out so children could watch the airplane come down beside San Felipe Creek. He reached California on November 5, too late for the prize but having crossed the continent by air.

Corpus Christi, TX

Calallen was platted in 1910 by the Calvin Townsite Company and named for cattleman Calvin J. Allen, rising on the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico rail line where plentiful water made it a farming hub for Nueces County. Between the 1920s and 1940s it supported a hotel, bank, funeral home, packing firm, and school district, drawing prominent South Texas cattlemen and merchants. New roads then funneled growth toward Corpus Christi, which annexed the town in 1970.

Lufkin, TX

From 1882 into the early 1900s, this square was the beating heart of Lufkin — crowded with cotton buyers, horse traders, band concerts, political rallies, and switching railroad trains. It held the fire station, the town standpipe, and a 1933 memorial library named for lumberman J. H. Kurth. In 1961 the square was renamed for Louis Calder, a New York friend of the Kurth family.

Lockhart, TX

The land that became Caldwell County began as part of DeWitt's Colony in 1825 and was carved from Gonzales County when the county was created and organized in 1848, with early settlements along Plum Creek and the San Marcos River. It honors Mathew Caldwell — nicknamed 'Old Paint' — a soldier-statesman who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and commanded the Texas Rangers. Lockhart was named the county seat.

Lockhart, TX

Caldwell County was organized in 1848 and named for Mathew Caldwell, a Texas Ranger and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The present courthouse in Lockhart—the county's third—was begun in 1893 and finished the next year, a three-story sandstone building in the Second Empire style, crowned with a central clock tower and outfitted with the era's latest conveniences, including electricity. Its mansard roof and elaborate detailing made it a proud civic landmark of the Gilded Age.

Lockhart, TX

Caldwell County lost its original log jail to an 1858 fire and held prisoners in the courthouse basement until outlaw activity prompted a stone prison in 1873. In 1908 county voters approved a $25,000 bond for this castellated brick jail, with the jailer's quarters on the ground floor and fifteen concrete-and-steel cells above, one rising from the building's center. Gallows are said to have been removed in the 1930s.

Caldwell, TX

With more than 2,700 burials, this cemetery mirrors the heritage of Caldwell and Burleson County. It began in 1890 when Warren Lodge No. 56 bought the land as a Masonic cemetery, though a few graves already dated back to 1860. Its tombstones reflect the strong Czech and German character of the area and mark veterans, officials, and ordinary residents; in 1950 the Masons conveyed it to a public cemetery association, and burials relocated from Krueger Cemetery joined it when Lake Somerville was created in 1964.

Caldwell, TX

In January 1903 local businessmen led by J.J. Lane and C.C. Nelms gathered to charter a national bank, and thirty subscribers pledged $25,000 to open Caldwell National Bank the next month. Operating under Federal Charter No. 6607, it became the first and oldest publicly owned financial institution in Burleson County, absorbing a rival bank in 1906 and moving to this site in 1909. Under C.C. Nelms, who served 58 years until his death in 1961, the bank grew into a steadying force in the local economy.

Caldwell, TX

Caldwell's volunteers banded together in 1886 as Hook & Ladder Co. No. 1 — five years before the town was even incorporated — buying their first hand-pulled truck, ladders, axes, and leather buckets through dues and citizen donations. Reorganized in 1907 and gradually supported by the young city, the department answered fires in town and countryside alike. It also stitched itself into community life, hosting circuses, maifests, and safety classes and tending Fireman's Park.

San Marcos, TX

Robert M. Caldwell, son of pioneer Texas colonists, built this San Marcos house in 1869. His wife was a sister of Edward M. House, the shadowy "Colonel House" who became President Woodrow Wilson's closest confidential adviser. The Kone family owned it from 1874, among them Edward Rives Kone, a long-serving county judge who won election as state agriculture commissioner in 1908.

Round Rock, TX

T. J. Caldwell and his wife Letitia raised this sturdy limestone house on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, quarrying its walls from the surrounding land and, as the marker plainly records, relying on the labor of enslaved people to build it. Their daughter Mary married Swedish immigrant Sven William Palm, whose family kept the property for more than a century. Around it grew the small Caldwell Heights community of school, cotton gin, and farmsteads.

Upland, PA · est. 1967

Caleb Pusey (1651–1727), an English-born Quaker lastmaker, purchased 250 acres from William Penn in 1681, the very year Penn received his charter for Pennsylvania. Serving as Penn's business agent, grist mill manager, and a colonial officeholder, Pusey was a trusted figure in the young colony—and his home is remembered as a place Penn himself visited. His house survives as a rare tangible link to Pennsylvania's founding generation.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1947

Thaddeus Stevens and James D. Paxton built the Caledonia iron furnace here in 1837, part of the charcoal-iron industry that fed early American growth. Stevens went on to become one of Congress's most uncompromising foes of slavery, and in June 1863 — as Robert E. Lee's army moved toward Gettysburg — Confederate Gen. Jubal Early singled out the works and destroyed them, in part as payback for the ironmaster's antislavery politics. Early burned the furnace on June 26 on his march toward York.

Columbus, TX

Chartered in early 1851, Caledonia Lodge did what many frontier Masonic lodges did on the Texas frontier — it became the town's first schoolhouse builder. Within weeks the Masons founded the Columbus Female Seminary, the first school in Columbus, raising a two-story building with classrooms below and their lodge hall above. In 1857 they went further and founded Colorado College, the town's first public school.

Mount Enterprise, TX

Caledonia Methodist Church traces to the late 1860s, when Methodists of the Caledonia community set out to organize formally and three local men bought a tract for a first meetinghouse. In those same years Thomas Smith Garrison and his wife Sarah arrived and became church leaders, and though they later moved on, their daughter Adele and her husband carried on the work. Garrison descendants and other longtime families guided the congregation through the twentieth century, and it remains active today.

Morgan, GA

Created in 1854 from former Creek lands in southwest Georgia, Calhoun County was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who resigned the vice presidency in 1832 to defend states' rights in the Senate against Daniel Webster. Calhoun also served as secretary of war and secretary of state. The marker lists the county's first officers.

Port Lavaca, TX

Calhoun County was carved from Victoria, Jackson, and Matagorda counties and organized in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, with the coastal town of Port Lavaca as its seat. It was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman who served in Congress and the Cabinet and as vice president of the United States. The marker records the county's creation at the moment the young state was organizing its government along the Gulf coast.

Port Lavaca, TX

Calhoun County was carved from three neighboring counties in the spring of 1846, just as Texas was joining the United States, and organized that July with Port Lavaca as its seat. It was named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina statesman, congressman, cabinet officer, and vice president whose long career shaped—and divided—antebellum national politics. The county's Gulf-coast location made its port a gateway for goods and settlers.

Port Lavaca, TX

Hurricanes have shaped Calhoun County's history as powerfully as any human event, their high winds, rains, and tidal surges repeatedly reordering life along Matagorda Bay. Entire towns vanished to 19th-century storms, including Indianola—a major Gulf seaport and the county seat—and the Republic-era port of Saluria on Matagorda Island. Alongside the loss of property and life run enduring stories of survival and rebuilding.

Port Lavaca, TX

Before World War II, Calhoun County lived by farming, ranching, and seafood — but after Pearl Harbor the Gulf Coast became a front line. The government condemned much of the shoreline, cleared Matagorda Island, and residents patrolled beaches after German U-boats sank Mexican cargo ships within sight of Port O'Connor. Camp Hulen trained anti-aircraft artillery, gunnery ranges rose on the barrier islands, and citizens spotted aircraft and even caught a man signaling submarines with a fishing-pole antenna.

Lumpkin County, GA

About a mile from here lies the Calhoun Gold Mine, said to be where vein gold was first found in Georgia by white prospectors. According to tradition, Benjamin Parks of Dahlonega stumbled on quartz gold while deer hunting in 1828, striking a find so rich it looked like egg yolk. The mine was later sold to Senator John C. Calhoun and worked by his son-in-law Thomas G. Clemson, whose fortune helped found Clemson College.