Wyalucing Plantation

Wyalucing, the two-story brick plantation home of Beverly Lafayette Holcombe, on a hilltop in Marshall, Texas, was built between 1848 and 1850 by slave labor. The house was designed to resemble a rectangular Grecian temple, with columns on all four sides. A second cottage-style residence called Westover was built on the western end of Holcombe's 100-acre tract, and the two homes were linked by a street lined with slave cabins. According to family tradition, the name Wyalucing is of Indian derivation and means "home of the friendless"; other sources translate it as "home of the warrior." Wyalucing was the scene of numerous social events in the antebellum period; Elkanah Bracken Greer and Anna Holcombe were married there in 1851, and Lucy Holcombe Pickens was married there on April 26, 1858. During the Civil War the building served as headquarters for the Trans-Mississippi Agency of the Confederate Post Office Department. In the spring of 1865 Confederate general Joseph O. Shelby addressed the troops of his Iron Brigade from the veranda of Wyalucing just before their departure on the Shelby expedition. In 1880 the home was purchased by former slaves of Harrison County for Bishop College, and Wyalucing was in use as the music hall in the 1940s. When Bishop College moved to Dallas in 1961 the Harrison County Historical Society tried to preserve Wyalucing, but the plantation building was demolished in the early 1960s, and the land is currently the site of a low-rent housing development.