City of Richmond

🏛️The era

Richmond's story starts in the earliest days of Anglo-American settlement in Texas. In the 1820s Mexico, newly independent from Spain, allowed empresarios like Stephen F. Austin to bring American families into Texas. The rich bottomlands along the Brazos River drew many of Austin's first colonists, and Richmond grew from one of those early settlements.

By the time the town was formally laid out in 1837, Texas had won its independence and become a republic. Land promoters were busy founding towns all over the new nation, hoping to profit from the settlers pouring in. Richmond's founders looked back east for a name, borrowing it from Richmond, Virginia.

The decades that followed brought the arrival of railroads, the upheaval of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and bitter political fights over who would hold power in Texas communities. Richmond lived through all of it, and its history reads like a condensed version of nineteenth-century Texas.

👥People & events

Members of Austin's colony first settled here in 1822 and called their community Fort Settlement. One early settler, William Morton, made the area's earliest known burial and donated land for what became Morton Cemetery. In 1837 R. E. Handy and William Lusk laid out the town, and a year later it became the county seat.

Richmond's most celebrated resident was Jane Long, remembered as the "Mother of Texas." Widely known for enduring a hard winter on the Texas coast in the early 1820s while awaiting her husband's return from an ill-fated expedition, she later settled in Richmond, ran the Veranda Hotel, and established a plantation. She rests in Morton Cemetery. The same year she arrived, 1837, the famous scout Erastus "Deaf" Smith died in Richmond. Smith had been one of the most trusted scouts of the Texas Revolution, and he too is buried in the town.

Later decades brought a cast of very different characters. Before she became a national figure smashing saloons in Kansas, Carry Nation ran the National Hotel in Richmond. Her departure was tied up with the Jaybird-Woodpecker feud, a violent struggle over control of county government in the years after Reconstruction. The Jaybirds were white Democrats, the Woodpeckers the faction that held county offices with the support of Black voters. The feud climaxed in 1889 with a shootout around the Courthouse Square, after which the Jaybirds took control.

John M. Moore offered a more peaceful kind of leadership. He worked to improve the quality of range cattle and went on to serve in the Texas Legislature from 1896 to 1905 and in the U.S. Congress from 1905 to 1913.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Few towns pack so much of a state's story into one place. Richmond connects to Austin's colonization, the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas, the early railroad era and the political battles of the late nineteenth century.

The railroad link is significant on its own. The Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado was the first railroad in Texas, and its arrival in 1855 tied Richmond's farms and plantations to the coast and to wider markets. It was part of the same railroad revolution that was transforming the whole country.

The Jaybird-Woodpecker feud carries the heaviest national weight. After the shootout, the victorious faction organized in a way that kept Black voters out of the county's decisive Democratic primary for decades. That arrangement became part of the long history of the white primary in the South, a practice eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the mid-twentieth century. What happened on Richmond's Courthouse Square is part of the larger American story of the fight over voting rights.

🧭If you visit

Richmond is an easy trip from Houston, set on the Brazos in Fort Bend County. Start near the courthouse, where you can stand on ground tied to both the founding of county government and the violence of 1889, and think about how much of Texas history passed through this square.

Morton Cemetery is a must for history lovers. Jane Long, one of the most storied women in early Texas, is buried there, and the cemetery's roots go back to the settlement's earliest days. Take time to walk it quietly and read the older stones.

The Brazos River itself is part of the story. It was the fertile land along its banks that drew Austin's colonists in the first place. Pair Richmond with other stops in the old Austin colony for a day that traces Texas from its first American settlers to statehood and beyond.