Matagorda lies on the east bank of the Colorado River just north of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The town was platted in 1829 by Elias Wightman, Hosea H. League, James E. B. Austin, Thomas M. Duke, and William Selkirk after Stephen F. Austin secured from...
Palacios is a bayside resort town bounded on two sides by the east and south segments of Trespalacios Bay, an arm of Matagorda Bay. The original mile-square townsite was platted in 1902 by the Palacios City Townsite Company as part of a larger agricultural...
Blessing was platted in 1907 by Matagorda County ranchers Jonathan E. Pierce and his son Abel B. Pierce. In 1903, Pierce granted right-of-way through his ranch, El Rancho Grande de Trespalacios, for the construction of the New York, Texas and...
Port Lavaca, originally called Lavaca and the county seat of Calhoun County, was laid out in 1841–1842 on the west shore of Lavaca Bay, an extension of Matagorda Bay into which the Lavaca River and Garcitas Creek drain. The name Lavaca (Spanish for “the cow...
Indianola was founded in 1849 on a low-lying sliver of sand on the edge of Matagorda Bay, where Powder Horn Bayou empties into the bay from Powder Horn Lake. It lay near the bayfront town of Indian Point, platted in 1846, and incorporated part of Karlshafen,...
Edna, county seat of Jackson County, was platted in 1882 by Lucy Dever Flournoy and the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway (NYT&M) as a townsite occupying eight hundred acres in the Robert Guthrie League, which had been granted to Lucy Flournoy's grandfather by...
Victoria, county seat of Victoria County, was established in 1824 on the east bank of the Guadalupe River as the political seat of empresarioMartín de León's colony, in which de León was authorized to settle one hundred families. De León named the town...
Refugio, county seat of Refugio County, was surveyed in 1834 by James Bray as the administrative center of the Power and Hewetson colony, established in 1828 by Irish-born Matamoros merchant James Power and his Irish-born partner James Hewetson, a politically...
Rockport, county seat of Aransas County, was laid out as a pair of townsites. The portion south of North Street was platted in 1867 by merchant Thomas M. Mathis, his cousin and business partner J. M. Mathis, and James M. Doughty. The portion north of North...
Fulton was founded by George W. Fulton in 1867 on the east shore of Live Oak Peninsula facing Aransas Bay. Fulton is a resort community. Texas highway 35 runs in a north–south line through Fulton on 8th Street, concealing from motorists the extraordinary...
Goliad, county seat of Goliad County, was laid out c. 1840 on the north bank of a bend in the San Antonio River within what had been the Mexican Ayuntamiento de Goliad. Goliad had its origin in the Franciscan mission of Nuestra Señora del Espíritu...
Beeville, county seat of Bee County, was laid out in 1859 on the north bank of Poesta Creek on a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre site donated by Patrick Burke and his mother and stepfather, Mary and Patrick Carroll. The Carrolls were Irish immigrants who came to Texas in...
Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate marched north in 1598 from central Mexico to the Rio Grande Valley near present-day El Paso. Oñate carried the Christianity of Mediterranean culture to far outposts, in this case Pueblo tribes along the...
The East Texas region can be more precisely defined and is less heterogeneous than any other region of the state. The region is bounded to the east by the Sabine River and the states of Louisiana and Arkansas, on the north by the Red River and Oklahoma, and on the west by the Trinity...
Huntsville was founded in 1836 by Pleasant and Ephraim Gray from Huntsville, Alabama, as a trading post with friendly local Bidai, Alabama, and Coushatta tribes. Farmers from the Upper South were the principal settlers, attracted by the plentiful timber and...
Groveton is the fourth and final seat for Trinity County, following land speculation, courthouse fires, and theft of records. After the Trinity and Sabine Railroad Company built a rail line through the forests in 1882, the Trinity County Lumber Company sawmill...
Omaha bankers Herman and Augustus Kountze developed the Sabine and East Texas Railroad extending north from Beaumont and in 1881 laid out a town, attracting numerous sawmills to the immediate area. Kountze was named the county seat in 1887. Oil discoveries in the...
Livingston, established in 1835 by Moses L. Choate from Livingston, Tennessee, was made the county seat in 1846. Its proximity to the Trinity River (now supplying Lake Livingston to the west) provided transport of timber and locally made milled goods. In a dispute...
Crockett was founded in 1837 on land donated by Andrew W. Gossett, part of a Mexican grant he received in 1833. Gossett had known David Crockett in Tennessee, and it is believed Crockett camped here en route to San Antonio in January 1836; a monument marks the...
Settlers with Mexican land grants arrived in the mid-1830s, farming small grass prairies within the pine forests. The county was organized in 1846. Steamboats on the Neches River first carried timber to mills and to the port at Beaumont until the arrival of the...
The site of present-day Nacogdoches, the area between the Bonita and La-Nana creeks, was occupied by the Nacogdoche of the Hasinai Confederacy, who built burial and ceremonial mounds here from c. 1250. All were leveled in the nineteenth century except...
Before Anglo-Americans began to settle here from the 1820s, the area was home to the Hasinai (of the Caddo Confederacy), whose village was located on the banks of Ayish Bayou and then, in 1717, to a Spanish mission, now gone. By 1827 the residents...
Located on the west banks of the Sabine River, the area that is now Shelby County was part of an ill-defined border region between Louisiana and Texas known in the early nineteenth century as the Neutral Ground, a haven for outlaws and smugglers. Settlers started...
Tyler was named for President John Tyler in recognition of his support for admitting Texas as the twenty-eighth state of the Union. The town was laid out around a two-block central square. Early settlers, primarily from Alabama and Tennessee, were...
Anglo-American settlers began to arrive in the 1830s, and the new town of Palestine was made the county seat with the formation of Anderson County in 1846. Located on a natural boundary between the great pine forests to the east and the rich Blackland Prairie...
Henderson was founded in 1843 as the seat of the new county of Rusk for its central location. A fire in 1860 destroyed much of the wood-built town. In 1930, Oklahoma wildcatter Columbus M. “Dad” Joiner struck oil at a site 6 miles west of Henderson. The East Texas...
Kilgore is located fifteen miles southwest of Longview, near the geographic center of the great East Texas oilfield. The town began in 1872, when the International and Great Northern Railroad (I&GN) built a line between Longview and Palestine and purchased a 174...
Corsicana was established in 1848 as the county seat of newly created Navarro County and named for the island of Corsica, the birthplace of the parents of Jose A. Navarro, hero of the Texas Revolution. Land for the town was donated and platted by early settler...
Ennis was established in 1872 along the alignment of the Houston and Texas Central (H&TC) Railway. The town was laid out by Theo Kosse, and within two years the new community had a population of 300. Free lots were offered to any Christian group that would build a...
Waxahachie, named for an Indian word meaning “buffalo creek,” contains some of the most impressive late-nineteenth-century commercial and residential buildings in Texas. The city is located on gently rolling land in the fertile Blackland Prairie region. Emory...
