George and Myra Wilson

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the one passin' it along. There are couples who settle down, and then there are couples who build the place up around them. George and Myra Wilson were the second kind.

They met in 1880, and barely a year later they were married, and from that point on, a small town started feeling the pressure of becoming something bigger. George and his brother opened a brick plant, and this wasn't some modest little side venture. Those bricks went into the City National Bank building, the First Baptist Church, Cumby High School, Sulphur Springs City Hall, and courthouses in Freestone, Llano, and Titus counties.

You drive through that part of Hopkins County today and look at the bones of those buildings, you're looking at Wilson work. While George and his brother were stacking the walls up, Myra was holding the community together from the inside. She was a charter member of the Joseph Wheeler Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

She served as President of the Ladies' Cemetery Society for forty-three years. Forty-three years. She also raised the funding for a cemetery chapel.

And both George and Myra stayed involved with the public library. Now the marker puts it plainly, and I think it earns the plain telling: the efforts of the Wilsons and others like them paved the way for cultural change in what had been, not so long before, a frontier state. Two people, one brick at a time, one meeting and one fund drive and one year of service at a time, turning Texas into something it hadn't quite been yet.

What the marker says

Only about a year after they met in 1880, George and Myra (Tuggle) Wilson married and began changing their small town into a bustling city. George and his brother opened a brick plant and were hired to build many prominent buildings such as the City National Bank building, First Baptist Church, Cumby High School, Sulphur Springs City Hall and the Freestone, Llano and Titus County Courthouses. Myra was a charter member of the Joseph Wheeler Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, was President of the Ladies" Cemetery Society for 43 years and raised funding for a cemetery chapel. Both were involved with the public library. The efforts of the Wilsons and others like them paved the way for cultural change in the once-frontier State of Texas.