DUANE
Get the App
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it right along to you. Picture a crossroads out in Waller County, the kind of place where two important trails meet and the world has no choice but to slow down and take notice. One road is the Atascosito Road.
The other is the San Felipe Trail. And right there at that junction, James Tarrant Pattison and his wife Sarah Smith Pattison put down roots on a Republic of Texas land grant and built themselves a homesite. A stagecoach stop, no less.
When you're sitting at the right crossroads, people are going to come to you. That's just geography doing its work. Now, five thousand acres is a number worth sitting with for a moment.
Five thousand. And on that plantation, the Pattisons didn't stop at farming. They built a grist mill.
They built a sawmill. They put up a cotton gin. This was not a family that did things halfway.
And when the community around them needed a church, and when it needed a school, those things came into being through the efforts of James Tarrant Pattison himself. The man was building more than a plantation. He was building a place.
Before 1854, a town had developed right there at that crossroads, and when it came time to give the town a name, well, a son by the name of George Madison settled that question. He named it for the original settler. His father.
James Tarrant Pattison, born in 1810, gone in 1872. The name stuck. The land held.
And when that marker was written, the heirs were still living right there. Some stories don't wander off. They stay put.
What the marker says
Located at important junction of Atascosito Road and the San Felipe Trail, this homesite was established by James Tarrant and Sarah Smith Pattison on their Republic of Texas land grant, and became a stagecoach stop. Their plantation of 5,000 acres had its own grist mill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The first church and school in the community were founded through the efforts of Pattison. Town developed here before 1854 was named by a son, George Madison, for the original settler, James Tarrant Pattison (1810-72). Heirs still live here. (1971)