DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll give it to you straight. John Richard Thomas came up from Alabama and arrived in Texas in 1854. What he had in mind wasn't small.
He set to work developing a ten-sixty-acre plantation, and right here on the Trinity River he built wharves. Cotton, corn, molasses, and other goods. He was moving product by water, and Thomas' Landing became a regular port of call, giving riverboats considerable business up and down that river.
For a stretch of years, this bend of the Trinity had commerce, noise, the smell of the water, and the weight of a working plantation behind it. Then the Civil War came. Eighteen sixty-one.
And John Richard Thomas, born in eighteen twenty, died in eighteen sixty-three, right in the middle of it. The war, and his death, brought adversity to his people. That is the plain word the record uses.
Adversity. Hold onto that word, because it carries more than it says. After the war came eighteen seventy-two, and with it a railroad built into Walker County.
River shipping ceased. Just like that, the landing had no reason left to exist. The big house went.
The other buildings went. The wharves along the Trinity, gone. What remains near this site today is the cemetery.
The river's still out there. The railroad came and won. And the only thing that stayed is where they buried the dead.
What the marker says
John Richard Thomas (1820-63) of Alabama came to Texas in 1854. Developing a 1060-acre plantation, he built wharves here on the Trinity for shipping his cotton, corn, molasses, and other goods. Thomas' Landing was a regular port of call, giving riverboats considerable business. The Civil War (1861-65) and Thomas' death brought adversity to his people. After 1872, when a railroad was built into Walker County, river shipping ceased. The landing, the plantation "big house" and other buildings once stood near the site now retaining the cemetery.