Judge Elijah Gossett

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some names you come across on the Texas road just sit there on a stone, quiet and patient, waitin for somebody to slow down long enough to hear what they carry. Judge Elijah Gossett is one of those names.

Born in Tennessee on February the first, 1788, Elijah Gossett made his way to a place and a time that would ask everything of a man. He was a soldier in the Army of Texas in 1836. Think on that a moment.

Eighteen thirty-six. That is not a quiet year in Texas history. That is the year the ground itself seemed to be deciding what it was going to become.

And Elijah Gossett was there, in uniform, part of that deciding. Then, when the smoke cleared and Texas stood on its own, a man like Gossett didn't ride off into some comfortable elsewhere. He put down roots.

By 1841 he was serving as Chief Justice of Houston County. Soldier, then judge. That is a particular kind of life, the kind that runs straight at whatever the moment requires.

He died on November the twenty-fourth, 1848, and was laid to rest in the red-dirt story of East Texas. But here is the thing that quietly stops you, if you let it. His wife, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Stone Gossett, born in Tennessee on September the first, 1789, outlasted him by less than a year.

She died on July the sixth, 1849. Born in the same state, bound to the same life, and gone within months of each other. The State of Texas saw fit to erect this marker in 1936, and that act says something too.

Some lives earn a second telling. This one surely did.

What the marker says

Judge Elijah Gossett A solider in the Army of Texas, 1836 Chief Justice of Houston County, 1841 Born in Tennessee Feb. 1, 1788 Died Nov. 24, 1848 His wife Elizabeth (Stone) Gossett Born in Tennessee Sept. 1, 1789 Died July 6, 1849 Erected by the State of Texas 1936