De Witt County
Yorktown, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Created March 24, 1846 from Gonzales, Victoria and Goliad counties; organized July 13, 1846, with Cameron as the county seat. Named in honor of Green De Witt, a Texas Empresario born in Kentucky February 12, 1787. Died in Mexico, May 18, 1835.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
DeWitt County was carved in 1846 from Gonzales, Victoria, and Goliad counties and organized that July with Cameron as its first seat. It honors Green De Witt, the Kentucky-born empresario whose colonization contract helped plant Anglo-American settlement in the region before his death in Mexico in 1835. The marker fixes a moment when the newly annexed state of Texas was drawing its county lines.
Why it matters
County-founding markers name the empresarios and settlers whose colonizing ventures turned Mexican Texas into an American frontier state.
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Related people
- · Green De Witt
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Co-Founders of Yorktown: John York_Charles Eckhardt
Yorktown, TX
Yorktown owes its founding to two very different frontiersmen. Kentucky-born John York came to Texas in 1821 and served as a captain in the 1835 siege that drove the Mexican army from Bexar, later giving the land for the town before dying in a fight with Indians in 1848. German immigrant Charles Eckhardt, a veteran of the Texas independence struggle and the Mexican War, surveyed a trade route from the coast to New Braunfels, built the town's first house, and made Yorktown a link in his freighting network.
Upper Yorktown Cemetery
Yorktown, TX
Ann Friar formally established this cemetery in 1872, burying her rancher husband, local Masons, and others on the family's ground. Its rolls read like a cross-section of frontier Texas — Anglo, German, and Hispanic settlers, victims of an 1876 feud, a Union sailor, and war veterans — and in 1949 an added acre made room for the community's African American residents.
Shiloh
Yorktown, TX
The farming community of Shiloh took shape around 1847 as families like the McBrides, Hamiltons, and Woods settled the DeWitt County land. Settlers organized a Methodist Episcopal church by 1851, built a sanctuary in 1852, and established Shiloh School in 1856, which served the area into the early twentieth century. The first burial in its cemetery, in 1857, was Montraville Woods, son of Texas patriot Zadock Woods; the renamed Woods Cemetery is all that survives of the vanished settlement.
Eckhardt Ranch House
Yorktown, TX
Robert Christian Eckhardt left Germany at 13 to join an uncle who helped found Yorktown, part of the wave of German immigrants who reshaped 19th-century Texas. A merchant with a large family, he built this ranch home in 1879 and commuted to his store, and the house has stayed in the family ever since. His descendants went on to include a U.S. Congressman, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other community leaders.