David Choate Jr.
Lumberton, Hardin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
David Choate Jr. was born in Louisiana in 1811. He moved with his family to Texas and later joined a group of Beaumont volunteers and fought in the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Choate received bounty for 320 acres of land for serving in the army and 640 acres of donation land for fighting in the Battle of San Jacinto. These lands were surveyed on the north side of Pine Island Bayou, where in 1856 he founded Concord, originally part of Jefferson County. It had a well-known ferry crossing that connected Beaumont to Points North. Choate and his wife, Mary (Coon), contacted the Orange County surveyor to lay out the town in 1858. Hardin County was created in 1858, carved out of Jefferson, Liberty and Tyler counties. The town of Hardin was created as the county seat in 1859. It was located on the Concord to Woodville road. Concord became the southern shipping point for steamboat traffic on the Neches River, bringing farm products and lumber from Hardin, Tyler and Jasper Counties into Beaumont. At its peak, concord had 300 residents. Concord and the town of Hardin thrived from steamboat traffic and shipping. With the completion of the railroads from Beaumont to Rockland, the town of Concord passed into history as steamboats were no longer needed. Concord was abandoned in 1880 but had served its purpose as a steamboat stop. David Choate Jr. died in Concord in 1879 and was buried in Leatherwood Cemetery, located on the David Choate survey. His widow died in 1909 and is also buried in the cemetery.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Born in Louisiana in 1811, David Choate Jr. joined a company of Beaumont volunteers and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, earning land bounties that he settled along Pine Island Bayou. There in 1856 he founded Concord, a steamboat shipping point whose busy ferry linked Beaumont to points north and drew farm goods and lumber from three counties. At its peak Concord held 300 residents—but when railroads reached the region, the steamboats fell silent and the town was abandoned by 1880.
Why it matters
Choate's rise and Concord's disappearance capture the whole arc of frontier Texas—from the Revolution's land grants to river-town boom to the ghost towns the railroads left behind.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Texas of David Choate Jr.'s youth was a place in the middle of becoming. He was born in Louisiana in 1811, and while he was still a boy, families like his were pushing west into the Mexican province of Texas, drawn by cheap land and the promise of a fresh start. This was the Early Republic era on the Texas frontier — a country of river bottoms, ox-carts, and ferries, where a good crossing over a bayou could be the difference between a town and a wilderness.
In 1836 that unsettled frontier erupted into revolution, as Anglo colonists and Tejanos broke from Mexico and fought for an independent Texas. The decisive clash came on April 21 of that year, a short and ferocious battle that secured Texas independence. Men who fought there were rewarded with land — the young Republic had little cash but vast acreage, and it paid its soldiers in the one currency it had.
Those land grants would shape settlement for a generation. Along the rivers and bayous of the coastal plain, veterans took up their surveyed acres, and where a bayou met a good road or a navigable river, a shipping town could grow.
People & events
Choate's life traces that whole arc. He moved with his family to Texas, joined a group of Beaumont volunteers, and fought in the battle that won Texas its independence in the spring of 1836. For his service he received a bounty of hundreds of acres, and for fighting in the battle itself, hundreds more in donation land.
He had those lands surveyed on the north side of Pine Island Bayou, and there, in the mid-1850s, he founded a town he called Concord. It had a well-known ferry crossing that connected Beaumont to points north, and with his wife, Mary, he brought in a county surveyor to lay out the town's streets and lots. When Hardin County was carved out of its neighbors at the end of the decade, the surrounding region got a county seat of its own nearby, linked to Concord by road.
For a while, Concord thrived. It became the southern shipping point for steamboat traffic on the Neches River, gathering farm products and lumber from several counties and sending them down to Beaumont. At its peak the town held around three hundred residents. But the very thing that made Concord — river transport — was also its vulnerability. When railroads reached the region, steamboats were no longer needed, and the town that had lived by the river quietly died by the rail. Choate died in Concord in 1879, just before the town was abandoned; his widow outlived both him and the town by decades. Both rest in a cemetery on the land he was granted for his service.
Its place in the American story
David Choate's story compresses the whole life cycle of frontier America into a single lifetime. A young man is rewarded for military service with land, turns that land into a town, sees the town flourish as a hub of trade, and then watches a new technology route the traffic elsewhere and empty the place out.
That pattern repeated itself thousands of times across the nineteenth-century United States. Rivers were the first highways, and river towns boomed as long as steamboats carried the nation's freight. Then the railroads came, and they did not follow the rivers — they cut their own paths, and the commerce of a region reorganized itself around depots instead of docks. Towns that could not get a rail line withered; the ghost towns of America are, very often, the river towns the railroads bypassed.
Concord is a textbook case, and Choate's biography ties it to the founding drama of Texas itself. The land that became a steamboat town was payment for a revolution, which links the grand narrative of independence to the humble, human-scaled story of a ferry, a few streets, and three hundred people who eventually moved on.
If you visit
Don't come expecting a town — that's the point. Concord passed into history well over a century ago, and what draws a visitor here is absence: the knowledge that a busy little river port once stood on this ground and is now returned to the bayou country of Hardin County.
Stand near Pine Island Bayou and picture the ferry that made this place matter, shuttling wagons and travelers on the road between Beaumont and points north. The waterways that were once Concord's highways are quiet now, and the quiet is the story. This is a landscape for the imagination as much as the eye.
The most tangible trace is the cemetery on the old survey, where the town's founder and his wife are buried. A country burial ground like this is a place to walk slowly and read the stones. Approach it with the respect any resting place deserves. For a road-tripper, Concord makes a thoughtful stop on a loop through East Texas — a reminder that some of the most interesting places on the map are the ones that used to be there.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · David Choate Jr.
- · Mary Coon Choate
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Former Townsite of Concord
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Founded in 1858 as Benton, this was the first town in Hardin County, planted at a strategic river crossing on the route from Beaumont to points north. It grew rapidly into a busy steamboat port of some 300 people, its fortunes riding on the traffic of the waterways. When the railroads arrived in the 1880s, they bypassed the old port and drew commerce elsewhere, and Concord dwindled away. Today only the townsite remains to mark where a thriving river landing once stood.
Site of Collier's Ferry
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A crossing near this spot on the old Opelousas Trail carried travelers over the Neches as early as 1750, when Spanish, French, and Anglo explorers, priests, and traders followed Indian traces toward Louisiana. Its greatest era came from the 1820s to 1900, when great cattle herds forded here to bypass the streets of Beaumont. Though many operated it, the ferry took its lasting name from the Collier family, who ran it for fifty years.
Nancy Tevis
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In 1825 Nancy Nixon Tevis and her husband Noah settled a bluff on the Neches, becoming the first known Anglo-Americans there and later receiving a Republic of Texas land grant covering much of what became Beaumont. Widowed young, Nancy held her ground with eight children through the Runaway Scrape of 1836, ran a profitable ferry, and joined with others in 1837 to found the town — renaming it from Tevis Bluff to Beaumont. Fiercely protective of her rights, she once appealed directly to President Sam Houston over a land dispute.
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