Bolivar Point
Port Bolivar, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1815 Colonel Henry Perry established a military camp here as part of a plan to invade Spanish Texas. In 1816 Galveston-based privateer Louis-Michel de Aury forced shiploads of captured African Slaves to walk from this point to New Orleans along old Indian Trails. Aury is credited with naming the point after South American liberator Simon Bolivar. While commanding a filibuster to win Texas independence, James Long established Fort Las Casas on Bolivar Point in 1820-21. His wife, Jane Herbert (Wilkinson), gave birth to a daughter, Mary James, in December 1821 at the fort. Mary James Long is often referred to as the first Anglo child born in Texas. A lighthouse, erected here by the Federal government in 1852 and later dismantled by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was rebuilt after the war. Many area residents sought shelter within the lighthouse during the damaging storms of 1900 and 1915. The Gulf and Interstate Railroad was completed from Beaumont to Bolivar Point in 1896. A boon to peninsula farmers, the railroad was destroyed in the 1900 storm, then rebuilt in 1903. Ferry service, purchased by the Texas Highway Department in 1933, continues to provide free public access to Galveston Island. (1995)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Bolivar Point was a stage for the tangled struggles over Spanish Texas in the early 1800s: Colonel Henry Perry camped here in 1815 planning an invasion, and the privateer Louis-Michel de Aury — who named the point for South American liberator Simón Bolívar — marched captive Africans from this shore toward New Orleans in 1816. James Long built Fort Las Casas here in 1820–21, where his wife Jane gave birth to a daughter often called the first Anglo child born in Texas. A federal lighthouse rose in 1852, was dismantled by Confederate troops, and rebuilt after the Civil War, later sheltering residents through the deadly storms of 1900 and 1915.
Why it matters
Few spots on the Gulf hold so much layered history — filibusters, the slave trade, the birth of a legend, and a lighthouse that guarded a hurricane coast — making Bolivar Point a crossroads of the early Texas story.
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Related people
- · Henry Perry
- · Louis-Michel de Aury
- · James Long
- · Jane Long
- · Simón Bolívar
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Galveston, C. S. A.
Galveston, TX
Galveston was Texas's most important seaport during the Civil War, a cotton-exporting city with foreign consulates and a ring of mud forts and gun batteries. Even under Federal blockade, daring blockade runners slipped out to Nassau, Havana, and Europe, trading cotton for guns and medicine. Confederates under General John B. Magruder retook the city on January 1, 1863, and the Trans-Mississippi Department made its final surrender here—followed on June 19 by the Emancipation proclamation that gave rise to Juneteenth.
Point Bolivar
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Point Bolivar served as headquarters for James Long's 1819 expedition, a bold attempt to wrest Texas from Spanish rule, and was named for the South American liberator Simón Bolívar. Here Mrs. Long and a small band waited until word arrived in 1822 that her husband had died. Years later the Republic of Texas raised a lighthouse on the point.
Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long
Port Bolivar, TX
Born in Maryland in 1798, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long followed her husband into the dangerous filibustering expeditions that sought to wrest Texas from Spain. Left to hold a fort on the Bolivar Peninsula through a brutal winter with her daughter and an enslaved woman named Kian, she gave birth there amid hunger and danger — the episode that earned her the honorary title "Mother of Texas." She later received her own headright of land in Austin's colony, unusual for a woman, and opened her San Felipe boarding house to the rallies and intrigue of the Texas Revolution.
SS Selma
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