George Washington Davis

🏛️The era

In the early 1830s Texas was part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. It was an unusual frontier, where the Mexican government had invited settlers in through a system of empresarios. These contractors were granted the right to bring in families and establish colonies. Green DeWitt's colony, centered on the town of Gonzales along the Guadalupe River, was one of the best known. Its land covered much of what is now DeWitt County.

Anglo-American families came in growing numbers, drawn by generous land grants. A league of land, the amount a family could receive, was roughly 4,400 acres. That was an enormous amount for people who had often farmed far smaller plots back East. Many of these settlers also brought enslaved people with them, and Mexican anti-slavery policy became one of several sources of friction.

By the early 1830s tensions were rising over self-government, immigration restrictions, trade and Mexico's shifting national politics. The colonists began meeting in conventions to state their grievances. Those meetings started a chain of events that ended in revolution in 1835 and 1836.

👥People & events

George Washington Davis was born in Pennsylvania in 1797 and brought his family to Texas in 1831. In the DeWitt colony he chose a league of land near where Cuero stands today. He committed himself to his new home. He took part in the colony's affairs and soon joined the political movement building among the settlers.

In 1833 Davis served as a delegate to the second Convention of Texas, held at San Felipe de Austin. That convention drafted a proposed constitution for Texas as a separate Mexican state, apart from Coahuila. Stephen F. Austin carried the petition to Mexico City, where he was eventually arrested. The episode deepened the colonists' frustration.

In 1835 Davis was again a delegate, this time to the Consultation at San Felipe. By then the fighting had begun. Shots were exchanged at Gonzales, in the DeWitt colony itself, in the early autumn of 1835. The Consultation met in that tense atmosphere and set up a provisional government for Texas. It was an important step toward the Declaration of Independence that came in 1836.

After the revolution, Davis held several local public offices in the new Republic. He and his wife, Rebecca, who died in 1846, are buried a short distance west of this marker. Davis died in 1853, a founder who lived to see Texas become an independent nation and then a state of the United States.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Texas Revolution is often remembered through its dramatic battles, the Alamo and San Jacinto. But revolutions also depend on meetings, petitions and elected delegates. Davis belonged to that political side of the story. Men like him turned scattered farm settlements into a community that could speak, and finally act, together.

The independence that came out of those conventions had national consequences. The Republic of Texas joined the United States in 1845. That led to the war with Mexico and to the U.S. acquiring vast western lands. Those gains reopened the fight over whether slavery would spread west, and that fight helped bring on the Civil War. The decisions made at San Felipe affected far more than Texas.

Davis's life also follows the larger pattern of American westward movement: a Pennsylvanian who crossed into what was then a foreign country, settled on its frontier, and helped reshape its borders. His story shows how migration and politics were tied together in the making of the American West.

🧭If you visit

This marker is in the Cuero area of DeWitt County, in the rolling, oak-dotted country of the Guadalupe River valley. It is a quieter part of Texas than the big-city corridors, with ranchland, small towns and old family cemeteries. This is the landscape the DeWitt colonists settled.

The marker notes that Davis and his wife are buried about 1.8 miles west. If you want to go further, keep in mind that rural family burial grounds can be on private land. Check local guidance and respect property lines before trying to visit.

For a road trip into the revolution's beginnings, Cuero pairs well with Gonzales, the colony's old capital and the site of the first skirmish. From there, you can follow the story on to other Texas Revolution sites. The marker was placed for the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986, and it is a good place to begin that journey.