City of Columbus

🏛️The era

In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain and inherited the vast, thinly settled province of Texas. That same year, Stephen F. Austin took up his late father's plan to bring American families into Texas under a Spanish, now Mexican, grant. His first colonists became known as the Old 300, and they are the founding generation of Anglo-American Texas.

The Colorado River valley was among the first places they settled. Rivers meant water, fertile bottomland and crossings, and this spot sat where an old trail running toward the Sabine River met the Colorado. Native peoples had camped here long before any colonist arrived.

Fifteen years later the colony was at war. In the Texas Revolution of 1836, the Colorado became a line of retreat as Texan forces fell back eastward ahead of Santa Anna's army. Settlements along the way paid a heavy price.

👥People & events

Around Christmas 1821, Robert and Joseph Kuykendall and Daniel Gilleland settled here, near old Indian campgrounds on the trail. Austin had already noted the spot's advantages. In 1823 he and the Baron de Bastrop, the colony's land commissioner, surveyed land here. Austin's capital ended up elsewhere, but the site lived on as a hamlet with a grist mill, a ferry and other improvements.

It became known as Beason's, after Benjamin Beason, and many Old 300 families made their homes here: the Alleys, the Tumlinsons, W. B. DeWees, James Cummins, Gabriel Strawn Snyder and others. In 1824 Milton Cook opened a tavern, and for years travelers passing through stopped at his door.

The village had its name by 1835. Then came the Revolution. The Texas Army itself burned the buildings here so they couldn't shelter or supply Santa Anna's forces. Whatever the families felt watching it happen, the fire was a deliberate act of war.

After the Texan victory at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, Columbus rose again. In 1837 W. B. DeWees, one of the original settlers, and J. W. E. Wallace platted the new townsite.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Columbus claims to be the oldest surveyed and platted Anglo-American town in Texas. That makes it the starting point of a story that ends with Texas joining the United States and transforming the nation's map.

Austin's colony was a legal, organized settlement under Mexican authority, built on surveys, grants and colonist rolls. The patterns set here, from land surveys to river-crossing towns, were repeated as the American population in Texas grew from a few hundred to tens of thousands within a generation.

Columbus also shows the cost of independence. Burning your own town to deny it to an advancing army is one of the hardest choices in war. Rebuilding afterward on a new plat is how many American frontier communities were born twice: once as settlements, and again as towns.

🧭If you visit

Columbus sits on the Colorado River, and it's worth finding a view of the water. The river is why this place exists: the crossing, the ferry, the mill and the old trail all depended on it.

As you walk or drive through town, remember that the streets follow a plan drawn up in 1837, after the original settlement was burned. Two layers of history sit on top of each other here, the Old 300 hamlet and the town that rose from its ashes.

Columbus makes an easy stop on a road trip through the heart of Austin's old colony, and it pairs well with other Revolution and colonial-era sites in the Brazos and Colorado river valleys. For anyone curious about where Anglo-American Texas began, this is one of the best places to start.