Green Dewitt Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the 1820s, Texas belonged to newly independent Mexico, and its northern frontier was thinly settled. To strengthen the region, the Mexican government invited colonists through the empresario system. A promoter, the empresario, received the right to settle a set number of families on a defined tract, and the families became Mexican citizens. Stephen F. Austin's colony is the best-known example, but several others followed.

Green DeWitt's colony was one of them. It lay southwest of Austin's settlements along the Guadalupe River, with Gonzales as its center. Settlers there lived on a raw frontier with real danger. Raids, hard farming and isolation were part of daily life.

By the mid-1830s, relations between Anglo-American colonists and the Mexican government had grown tense over political control, immigration restrictions and the shape of the Mexican state itself. Gonzales would become the place where those tensions first turned into open fighting.

👥People & events

Green DeWitt, born in 1787, and Sarah Seely DeWitt, born in 1789, lived in Missouri when Green petitioned the Mexican government for an empresario grant. He won the right to settle 400 Anglo-American families. In 1826 the DeWitts brought their own family to Texas and began the work of building a colony.

Sarah was not just an empresario's wife. In 1831 she received her own land grant, the Sarah Seely League. A woman holding land in her own name on that frontier is worth noticing. This one-acre family cemetery was later set aside from her league.

Green DeWitt died in 1835 and was buried in Mexico. Sarah's grave here stands near a memorial to him. That same year, the colony entered history. In the fall of 1835 Mexican troops came to Gonzales to take back a small cannon that had been lent to the settlers for defense. The colonists refused and raised a homemade flag showing a cannon and the defiant words Come and Take It. The skirmish that followed is widely remembered as the opening of the Texas Revolution.

Sarah DeWitt is remembered as the woman behind that flag, and family tradition holds that she helped sew it from household cloth. She lived until 1854 and saw Texas become an independent republic and then an American state. The first known burial in this cemetery was her grandson, Jonas DeWitt, who died in 1851 as a small child.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The DeWitt cemetery connects to one of the most important turning points in North American history. The Anglo-American colonies that Mexico invited into Texas eventually broke away, formed the Republic of Texas, and joined the United States. That annexation helped bring on the Mexican War and the huge shift of territory that followed. Much of that chain of events traces back to empresario colonies like DeWitt's.

The Come and Take It flag has become one of the lasting symbols of American defiance, and it is still reproduced and displayed today. Here you can stand near the grave of the woman remembered for making it. That puts a face, and a woman's hands, on a symbol usually told as a story about men and guns.

The story is also complicated, and it's worth saying so. The colonists came as guests and citizens of Mexico. The revolution they started involved disputes over self-government, but also over slavery, which Mexico opposed. Understanding Gonzales means holding both the courage of the moment and the larger forces behind it.

🧭If you visit

This is a small family cemetery set on land from Sarah DeWitt's own grant, so expect quiet rather than crowds. Look for Sarah's grave and the nearby memorial to Green, which stands in for a man buried far away in Mexico. The small grave of their grandson Jonas is a reminder that this was a family burial ground before it was a historic site.

Treat the place with care. It is a burial ground, and the people here have descendants. Stay on paths, leave stones and grave goods untouched, and take only photographs.

Gonzales is a rewarding stop for anyone following the Texas Revolution. The town embraces its role as the place where the first shot was fired, and you'll find the Come and Take It image all around. Pair this cemetery with time in town and you can follow the story from the family who settled the colony to the day their neighbors dared an army to come and take their cannon.