Biohazard Cleanup Near West Marshall Marshall, TX

Marshall was founded in 1841 as the seat of Harrison County on land donated by Peter Whetstone and Isaac Van Zandt, was named by Van Zandt in honor of U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, and was incorporated in 1844.

By 1850 Marshall had become one of the wealthiest towns in East Texas, with about 2,000 residents and a dense cluster of churches, schools, and civic organizations.

Marshall was the first town in Texas to have a telegraph, and by 1854 its newspaper had a telegraph link to New Orleans that gave it quick access to national news.

During the Civil War, Marshall was an important Confederate stronghold that hosted the wartime capital of Missouri's exiled Confederate government and the postal headquarters of the Confederacy's Trans-Mississippi Department.

Marshall's Wyalucing plantation was the childhood home of Lucy Holcombe Pickens, the only woman whose portrait appeared on Confederate currency.

Marshall earned the nickname 'the Athens of Texas' for the many colleges founded there, which included Marshall University, the Marshall Masonic Female Institute, Wiley College, Bishop College, and East Texas Baptist College.

The Texas and Pacific Railway made Marshall its division point in the 1870s, with shops and offices that turned the city into a major railroad hub known as the 'Gateway to Texas.'

Wiley College, founded in Marshall in 1873 by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate freedmen, is the oldest African-American college west of the Mississippi River.

Wiley College's debate team, coached by professor and Harlem Renaissance poet Melvin B. Tolson, pioneered interracial college debates in the segregated South - the story later dramatized in the film 'The Great Debaters.'

Bishop College was founded in Marshall in 1881 for Black students, on the grounds of the former Wyalucing plantation, which freedmen had purchased in 1880.