Local History
Texas Land Grant Historical Markers: Who Got the Land and How They Got It
Five real Texas historical markers about land grants, from the Old Three Hundred at San Felipe to the Peters Colony riot in Lewisville. Addresses included.
Photo: Bryan Dickerson / Unsplash. Fence line across a Texas wildflower pasture.
Texas has more than 16,000 official historical markers, and a surprising number of them are about dirt. Not battles. Land. Who got it, how much of it, and what they promised in exchange. RoadHistorical is a Texas historical preservation platform that surfaces those markers as you drive past them. This guide covers five land grant markers you can pull over and read, from the Brazos bottoms to the Alsatian hills west of San Antonio.
San Felipe de Austin: Where the Old Three Hundred Signed
San Felipe de Austin was Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital and the site of his land office. Every settler in the first colony walked through that door. Austin wanted people who were Catholic, sober, and willing to swear allegiance to Mexico before he handed over a land permit.
A league of grazing land ran 4,428.4 acres. A labor of farmland added another 177.1. Between July and mid-August of 1824, Baron de Bastrop issued roughly 270 titles covering more than 1.5 million acres. Those families became the Old Three Hundred, though Austin only ever issued 297 grants.
Stand at the marker on FM 1458 and the scale gets easier to feel. One signature, 4,600 acres, no survey stakes yet in the ground.
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Victoria: The Only Colony That Stayed Mexican
The gray granite Centennial marker at Church and Bridge Street reads Home of Empresario Martin De Leon. It went up in 1936, and the text is blunt in the way old markers often are.
De Leon was born at Burgos, Mexico, in 1765. He made captain in the Spanish Army by 1790 for bravery in Indian fighting. In 1824 he received a grant to settle 41 families, and he laid out the town of Victoria. A second grant in 1829 let him bring 150 more. He died in Victoria in 1833.
The last line on the plaque is the one worth the stop. His colony was the only one in which Mexican customs and traditions prevailed. Every other empresario colony filled up with Anglo settlers from the United States. De Leon's did not.
Church St & Bridge St, Victoria, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Gonzales and Castroville: Two Empresarios, Two Very Different Deals
Green Dewitt Cemetery sits on an acre in Gonzales that never worked like the other grants. The 2002 marker tells you Green and Sarah Dewitt moved their family from Missouri to Texas in 1826. He'd petitioned the Mexican government for an empresario grant to settle 400 Anglo-Americans southwest of Stephen F. Austin's colony.
Then Sarah got a grant of her own. In 1831 the Sarah Seely League came to her, and this acre was set aside from it for a family cemetery. She's the one known for the come and take it flag. Her grave is here. Green's is not. He died in 1835 and is buried in Mexico, so what stands beside her is a memorial.
Green Dewitt Cemetery, Gonzales, TX
A hundred miles west, the Site of the Homestead of Henri Castro marker stands in the center of Castroville. Castro was a naturalized American of French origin who befriended the Republic of Texas. In 1842 he got authority to plant a colony of Europeans in southwest Texas. He found his ground on the Medina River, inside a grant Charles III of Spain had made back in 1766.
He recruited 485 families and 457 single men, most of them Alsatians. He spent his own money keeping them fed. When he platted the Castroville townsite in 1844, he kept the block next to the courthouse site for himself. He built a stone dwelling there and planted an experimental garden, testing which crops would take in the local soil.
Site of the Homestead of Henri Castro, Castroville, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
Lewisville: The Land Deal That Ended in a Riot
The Peters Colony marker stands at 1197 West Main Street in Lewisville, in front of the municipal building. The story on it is the least romantic land grant story in Texas, and probably the most honest.
In 1841 the Republic of Texas signed an empresario contract with W. S. Peters and 19 partners. They agreed to settle 600 families in three years. Each family got seed, shot, a cabin, and 640 acres. Single men got 320. The company kept half the land as its cut.
By 1848 about 1,800 colonists had moved in. They resented how the company parceled things out. In 1852 they ran the company's agent, Henry O. Hedgcoxe, out of the country in what Texans still call the Hedgcoxe War. The reservation eventually spanned five counties and covers ground where a quarter of the state now lives.
1197 W Main St, Lewisville, TX
Find it in RoadHistorical before your visit.
How RoadHistorical Finds These Markers
Land grant markers are scattered. One sits in a family cemetery, another on a farm road, another in front of a municipal building 300 miles away. Discovery Mode handles that problem for you. It notifies you when you're coming up on a marker, so you find out before the exit, not after it.
The AI Tour Guide answers what the plaque leaves out. Ask it how big a league actually was, or why Mexico wanted Catholic colonists, and you get an answer in the car. Offline mode keeps all of it working in the parts of Texas where your bars disappear, which is most of the interesting parts.
Start Discovering Texas History Today
RoadHistorical is free to download on iPhone and Android. Download it here and turn on Discovery Mode before your next drive. Android users can download RoadHistorical from Google Play.
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