Marker Details

Marker Text: Obedience Smith was a pioneer of three American frontiers: Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas. Newly widowed, she arrived in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas from Jackson, Mississippi just weeks before the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836. She had followed her son, Colonel Benjamin Fort Smith (1796-1841), Adjutant to General Sam Houston.



She received a land grant from the Republic of Texas in 1838 and chose 3,368 acres (5.26 square miles) of the league and a labor to commence in downtown Houston near Lamar and Louisiana, extend west to River Oaks, south to Rice University, northeast to Wheeler at Crawford, and north to the place of beginning. Thus, "out of the Obedience Smith Survey" appears on thousands of inner-city titles now worth billions of dollars.



Obedience was the daughter of Elias Fort, leading deacon of the Particular Baptist churches in Edgecombe County, North Carolina and later in Robertson County, Tennessee. Her husband was Major David Smith (1753-1835), a Revolutionary War patriot, Indian fighter, and lumber mill owner in the Natchez and Cumberland Districts. She had eleven children, only four surviving her.



She was a founder of the First Baptist Church of Houston in 1841, and matriarch of the families of Judges John W.N.A. Smith and T.B.J. Hadley; Hiram George Runnels, Mississippi governor and later Texas state senator; Colonels Benjamin Franklin terry and Thomas Saltus Lubbock of Civil War fame; Justice David Smith Terry, the "dueling judge" of California; Aurelia (Hadley) Mohl, suffragist and founder of the Texas Women's Press Association; Margaret (Hadley) Foster, first librarian of the Houston Lyceum, forerunner of the Houston Public Library; and Mabel (Franklin) Smith-Astin, a founder of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Several Houston streets and three Texas counties are named for family members.



Marker Is The Property Of The Winlow Place Civic Club