Colorado County
Columbus, Colorado County, Texas
Marker Inscription
A part of Stephen F. Austin's First Colony. Created March 17, 1836. Organized in 1837. The river traversing the region was called "Colorado" (Red) by Spanish explorers who mistook it for the reddish Brazos. From the river, the county took its name. Columbus, the county seat.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Colorado County lay within Stephen F. Austin's First Colony and was formally created in March 1836, in the same weeks Texas declared its independence. It took its name from the river running through it — christened 'Colorado,' or 'red,' by Spanish explorers who confused it with the muddier Brazos. Columbus, the county seat, grew up on its banks.
Why it matters
The county's founding at the very birth of the Republic, and its Spanish-derived name, capture the layered heritage of a Texas shaped first by Spain and then by Anglo-American colonization.
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Related people
- · Stephen F. Austin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
George Glenn
Columbus, TX
Born into slavery in 1850 and raised on a Colorado County ranch, George Glenn trained as a cowhand and trail cook and stayed on the Johnson Ranch as a free man after Emancipation. On an 1870 cattle drive to Abilene his employer, Bob Johnson, died; after the herd was sold, Glenn disinterred the body and drove it nearly 800 miles home by wagon over six weeks for reburial. Honored decades later at Old Trail Drivers reunions and interviewed by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, he became one of the few Black members remembered by name from the great cattle-drive era.
Keith-Traylor House
Columbus, TX
Civil War veteran John Wilbur Keith and his wife Haseltine moved to Columbus in 1870 and built this house around 1871, selling it a few years later to merchant Charles W. Traylor and his wife Lura, granddaughter of an early Colorado River ferry operator. Children of both families were born in the house, and in 1896 a Keith son and a Traylor daughter were married there. Successive additions gave the home its Queen Anne detailing and late-Victorian center-passage character.
Youens-Hopkins House
Columbus, TX
Built in the 1860s of cypress and pine on locally fired brick foundations, this modest cottage stood on the Texas frontier as Columbus was still finding its footing. It passed through a line of notable owners — from county's first banker James H. Simpson to a county clerk — before Dr. Willis G. Youens bought it in 1915, beginning a long tenure by a family of local physicians. More than a century and a half on, it remains in that family's hands.
Columbus' Old City Cemetery
Columbus, TX
Columbus's old cemetery holds the founders of one of Texas's oldest towns, with its earliest headstone dating to 1853 and the city taking title to the seven acres in 1870. Among the buried are Benjamin Beason and town founder W.B. DeWees, both of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists, early historian Dilue Rose, a War of 1812 and Texas Revolution veteran, and numerous Confederate soldiers and victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic.