Marshall, an east Texas town, was a center of Confederate activity west of the Mississippi during the Civil War. It housed the headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi Department Medical Bureau and Postal Service, two military hospitals, a commissary bureau, and an ordnance bureau, depot, arsenal, and laboratory that produced and distributed powder, pistols, saddles, harness, and clothing. After Union forces occupied Missouri, that state's governor and other officials made Marshall the wartime Confederate capital of Missouri from November 1863 to June 1865. Three wartime conferences of governors and Confederate military officials from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri met there; one in 1862 led to the establishment of a separate department for those states, and in 1863 military and civil authority was consolidated under Gen. E. Kirby Smith, commander of the department. On May 15, 1865, one month after Appomattox, discussion there over continued resistance or surrender ended in a stalemate. Prominent Confederates from Marshall included Edward Clark and Pendleton Murrah, wartime governors of Texas; Louis T. Wigfall, a states' rights leader in the U.S. Senate before secession and later a member of the Confederate Senate; Dr. James Harper Starr, Trans-Mississippi Postal Agent; and Brigadier-Generals Matthew D. Ector, Elkanah Greer, Walter P. Lane, and Horace Randal. Marshall was also the home of Lucy Holcombe Pickens, the Sweetheart of the Confederacy, the only woman whose portrait appeared on Confederate currency. At the war's end, rather than surrender, a number of high-ranking Confederate military and civil officials began an exodus from Marshall to Mexico.