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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1846 Texas was brand new to the Union. It had been annexed at the end of 1845, and one of the first jobs of the new state government was drawing the map, carving out counties that could keep records, hold courts and govern a growing population. DeWitt County was created on March 24, 1846, from parts of Gonzales, Victoria and Goliad counties. It was organized that July.
The land itself had a longer story. Two decades earlier, while Texas was still part of Mexico, the Mexican government invited settlers in through empresarios. These were contractors who promised to bring families and establish communities in exchange for land grants. This region along the Guadalupe River was part of one of those colonies.
Between the colony and the county came the Texas Revolution and nearly ten years as an independent republic. Naming the new county for a colonial founder shows how early Texans remembered their beginnings, honoring the men whose ventures had brought them there.
People & events
Green DeWitt was born in Kentucky in 1787, part of the generation of Americans who pushed steadily west. Like Stephen F. Austin, he saw opportunity in Mexican Texas. He secured an empresario contract to settle families in the region. His colony's main town was Gonzales, which would later become famous in the Texas Revolution.
The work was hard and the rewards uncertain. Settlers faced isolation, disease and conflict on a contested frontier, and building a colony took years of persistence. DeWitt died in Mexico in May 1835, just months before the Revolution broke out in the colony he had helped found. He did not live to see Texas independence, statehood, or the county that bears his name.
When the county was organized in 1846, Cameron was named its first county seat. Like many early Texas county seats, it did not stay the seat for good, and the government later moved as towns rose and fell. Today Cuero serves that role. The marker here in Yorktown keeps the founding story in view.
Its place in the American story
The empresario system was one of the most important factors in American history on the Southwest frontier. Mexico hoped colonists would settle and secure its northern lands. Instead, the Anglo-American settlement it encouraged set the stage for the Texas Revolution, annexation, and the Mexican-American War that followed. Green DeWitt's colony was one of the places where that story began.
DeWitt's own life follows a common American pattern. He was born in Kentucky and pushed west toward new land and new risks. The same westward movement that settled Kentucky carried families to Missouri, Texas and beyond.
The county's creation in 1846 marks the moment when the former Mexican colony and independent republic became an American state. Every county line drawn that year made the idea of Texas statehood concrete.
If you visit
This marker is short, but it covers a lot of history: Mexican colony, revolution, republic and statehood, all in a few lines about one man and one county. Read it with that sequence in mind and the names and dates come alive.
DeWitt County is rolling country along the Guadalupe River, and a drive through it gives a sense of the land the early colonists saw. Yorktown, where this marker stands, makes a good stop on a back-roads tour of the area.
To follow the story further, trace the path of DeWitt's colony. Cuero, the present county seat, is nearby, and Gonzales, heart of the old DeWitt colony, is a short drive north. Visiting these places together turns a single marker into a road trip through the founding of Texas.
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
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Co-Founders of Yorktown: John York_Charles Eckhardt
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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.
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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.
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