Emily Margaret Brown Austin Bryan Perry
Jones Creek, Brazoria County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(1795-1851) Born near Austinville, Virginia, as was her brother Stephen Fuller Austin (1793-1836), Emily moved with her father Moses Austin (1761-1821) and mother Maria Brown Austin (1768-1824) to Missouri in 1798. The family operated lead mines there and founded the town of Potosi, south of St. Louis. Emily was sent to schools in Kentucky and New York and returned to Missouri in 1812. She married James Bryan (1788-1822) in 1813 and gave birth to five children at Hazel run, Missouri. After James died, Emily subsisted by taking boarders and teaching school. She married James Franklin Perry (1795-1853) in 1824 in Missouri; their union produced six children. By the end of 1831, the Perry family-- including Emily, James, four Bryan children, two Perry children, James' niece, and nine slaves-- had joined Emily's brother Stephen in Texas. They settled at San Felipe and built a house at Stephen's Peach Point Plantation, providing a home and counsel for her bachelor brother. The Bryan and Perry offspring contributed greatly to the development of Texas. Emily's sons served as soldiers and statesmen, and preserved the Austin bloodline. Emily died at Peach Point shortly after a trip to Philadelphia, and was buried here at Gulf Prairie Cemetery. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Emily Austin was the sister of Stephen F. Austin, the empresario who led the first Anglo-American colonization of Texas. Raised in the lead-mining town of Potosi, Missouri, that her father Moses Austin helped found, she twice married and raised a large family before bringing her household to Texas in 1831 to join her bachelor brother. From the family's Peach Point Plantation she offered Stephen a home and counsel during the crucial years of colonization and the Texas Revolution, and her descendants went on to help build the new republic and state.
Why it matters
The Austin family stands at the origin of Anglo Texas, and Emily's steady presence anchored her famous brother's work through the founding of the Republic. Her life also reflects how women shaped the frontier through family, property, and endurance rather than public office.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the first decades of the 1800s, the trans-Mississippi frontier was a place people reached by hard travel and harder decisions. Emily Austin's world began in the lead country of southwestern Virginia, then moved west with the mineral trade to Missouri while it was still Spanish, then American, territory. Families like hers built towns around mines, mills, and mercantile houses, and their fortunes rose and fell with the ore.
By the 1820s a new frontier had opened to the southwest. Mexico, newly independent from Spain, invited Anglo-American settlers into its northern province of Texas under the empresario system, in which a contractor recruited families and settled them on land grants. Emily's father and then her brother were at the very center of that experiment, and her own life was pulled steadily toward it.
The Texas the Perry household entered at the end of 1831 was still Mexican soil, thinly settled, its Anglo colonists clustered along the rivers of the coastal plain. Within five years it would fight a revolution and declare itself a republic. Emily lived through the whole arc, from the mining towns of the old frontier to the founding of a new nation on the Brazos.
People & events
Emily Margaret Brown Austin was born in 1795 near Austinville, Virginia, into a family whose name would become inseparable from Texas. Her father, Moses Austin, moved the household to Missouri when Emily was a small child, operating lead mines and helping found the town of Potosi. Her brother, Stephen Fuller Austin, two years her senior, grew up alongside her before becoming the empresario who led the first legal Anglo-American colonization of Texas.
Emily's own life was one of endurance as much as adventure. Schooled in Kentucky and New York, she married James Bryan in 1813 and bore five children before his death left her a young widow. She kept her family afloat by taking in boarders and teaching school — plain, demanding work — before marrying James Franklin Perry in 1824, a union that added six more children to her care.
At the end of 1831 the whole Perry household made the move to Texas: Emily and James, four Bryan children, two Perry children, a niece, and the enslaved people the marker records the family as holding. They settled near San Felipe and built a home at her brother's Peach Point Plantation, giving the bachelor empresario a household and steady counsel during the most consequential years of his life. Emily died at Peach Point in 1851, not long after a trip to Philadelphia, and was buried at Gulf Prairie Cemetery.
Its place in the American story
The Austin name marks the hinge point where the United States began to spill past its own borders into what was then Mexican territory — a movement that would, within a generation, reshape the map of North America. Stephen F. Austin is remembered as the leader of that colonization, but leaders are sustained by the people around them, and Emily was one of the steadiest.
Her story is also a window into how women shaped the frontier without ever holding office. Emily influenced events through family, property, hospitality, and sheer persistence: raising and safeguarding two sets of children, anchoring a plantation household, and offering her brother a home base during colonization and revolution. When she outlived him, it was her sons who carried the Austin bloodline and served the young republic and state.
Her life is a reminder that the settlement of Texas — like so much of the American frontier — was a family enterprise, and that its costs and contradictions, including the household's ownership of enslaved people, are part of that history rather than separate from it.
If you visit
This is a memorial at Gulf Prairie Cemetery near Jones Creek, in the coastal country of Brazoria County where the Austin colony took root. The setting is quiet prairie and river-bottom land — flat, green, and often humid, with the Gulf not far off. It rewards a slow, reflective visit rather than a quick photo stop.
Stand for a moment with the dates on the marker: a woman born in 1795 who buried two husbands, raised eleven children, and lived to see a republic founded on the ground around her. The nearby landscape of the old Peach Point Plantation and the Brazos River is the same country she helped hold together for her famous brother.
If you're building a road trip through the birthplace of Anglo Texas, this memorial pairs naturally with the other Austin-family and early-colony sites scattered across Brazoria County. Come for the famous name; stay for the far less famous life that supported it.
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
- · Emily Austin Perry
- · Stephen F. Austin
- · Moses Austin
- · James Franklin Perry
Related events
- · Anglo colonization of Texas
- · Founding of the Republic of Texas
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
One-Eighth Mile South to Peach Point
Jones Creek, TX
A short distance from here stood the home of Emily M. Perry (1795–1851), the only sister of Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas." After the town of San Felipe burned on March 29, 1836, during the turmoil of the Texas Revolution, Austin regarded Peach Point as his home. The plantation tied the family of Texas's chief colonizer to the coastal plains of Brazoria County.
Brazoria Townsite
Brazoria, TX
Founded in 1828 by John Austin, a friend of colonization leader Stephen F. Austin, Brazoria grew into a port, market, and social center for the young Anglo colony. Here Jane Long — widow of the filibuster Dr. John Long, who had tried in 1819 to wrest Texas from Spain — kept a tavern that anchored the town's public life. Burned during the Texas Revolution and rebuilt, Brazoria served as a county seat and business hub until 1897.
Site of Jane Long's Tavern
Brazoria, TX
Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, sometimes called the "Mother of Texas," opened a boarding house on this site in 1832 after years on the Gulf frontier. Her tavern at the busy port of Brazoria became a hub of Anglo-American political life: she hosted a benefit for Stephen F. Austin in 1835 after his release from a Mexican prison, and in 1836 a ball attended by President Sam Houston and the adjourned Congress of the Republic. She later moved on to run a hotel in Richmond.
William Joel Bryan
Jones Creek, TX
Grandson of Moses Austin, whose colonizing dream reshaped Texas, William Joel Bryan came to the country with his family in 1831 and served in the Texas army from 1835 to 1838 during the struggle for independence. A prosperous planter, he was instrumental in building a deepwater port at the mouth of the Brazos and lived at 'Durazno,' a plantation given to him by his uncle Stephen F. Austin. The city of Bryan, Texas, bears his name.