Jose Antonio Navarro
Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Lover of liberty. Foe of despotism. Born in San Antonio, Texas, February 27, 1795. Died January 13, 1871 and buried there. Member of the Legislature of Coahuila and Texas, 1821; land commissioner of De Witt's colony 1831 and of Bexar District, 1834-1835; signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836; member of the Congress of the Republic of Texas, 1838-1839; a commissioner of the Santa Fe Expedition, 1841; member of the Constitutional Convention of 1845; senator in the Legislature of Texas, 1846-1849. Navarro County gratefully bears his name. Corsicana was named by him for the isle of his father's birth - Corsica. Erected by the State of Texas 1936 with funds appropriated by the federal government to commemorate one hundred years of Texas Independence.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
José Antonio Navarro was a San Antonio–born statesman who bridged Spanish, Mexican, and Texan governments across a revolutionary generation, serving in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas and then signing the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He went on to help write the state constitution and sit in the Texas Senate, and he lent his name both to Navarro County and to Corsicana, which he called after his father's native Corsica. This 1936 centennial marker honors a rare native-born Tejano leader of the Republic.
Why it matters
Navarro's career shows that Texas independence was not solely an Anglo-American story but also carried forward by Tejano leaders who staked their standing on the new republic.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
José Antonio Navarro's life spans one of the most turbulent stretches of North American history. When he was born in San Antonio in 1795, Texas was a remote frontier province of the Spanish Empire. By the time he died there in 1871, the same ground had been part of independent Mexico, an independent republic, a U.S. state, a member of the Confederacy, and a state working its way through Reconstruction. He lived under several flags without ever leaving home.
After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, Texas was joined with Coahuila in a single Mexican state, and the government invited colonists from the United States to settle its empty lands. Tejano leaders in San Antonio, Navarro among them, often supported this colonization. They believed settlement would bring prosperity and security against raids. Navarro worked as a land commissioner for De Witt's colony and for the Béxar district, so he helped shape how that land was granted.
In the 1830s, tension grew between Texas and the central government in Mexico City over federalism, local self-government and the authority of the national state. That conflict led to the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836. Many Tejanos faced a painful choice in it, and some of the most prominent sided with independence. The marker that honors Navarro was itself a product of a later moment: the 1936 Texas Centennial, when the state, using federal funds, placed monuments across Texas to tell the story of its founding.
People & events
Navarro was the son of a father born on Corsica who settled in Spanish San Antonio. He grew up in the city's established Tejano community. He was largely self-educated, and he rose through public service. He sat in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas, oversaw land grants, and became a respected voice for Texans of every background. Through all of it he stayed a lifelong defender of local self-government against centralized power, which is the spirit captured in the marker's opening words.
In March 1836 he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He and his uncle, José Francisco Ruiz, are remembered as the only two native-born Texans among the signers. He then served in the Congress of the new Republic. In 1841 he joined the Santa Fe Expedition as a commissioner. This was President Mirabeau B. Lamar's attempt to extend Texas authority and trade into New Mexico, and it ended in disaster: the Texans were captured by Mexican forces. Navarro, regarded by Mexico as a traitor, was held as a prisoner for years before he escaped and returned home in 1845.
He came back in time to serve in the Convention of 1845, which wrote the constitution under which Texas joined the United States. He was the only Mexican Texan delegate, and he is remembered for arguing against limiting the vote to white men, a position that protected Tejano citizenship. He then served in the new state senate. When a county was carved out of this part of North Texas in 1846, it took his name. He in turn named its seat, Corsicana, after his father's native island.
Its place in the American story
Navarro's career challenges a simplified version of Texas history in which independence was purely an Anglo-American achievement. Tejanos fought, voted, governed and signed the documents that created the Republic. Navarro was one of the most consequential of them. His life shows that the region's Spanish and Mexican heritage was a living presence in Texas government, not a background that faded once new settlers arrived.
His story also shows the cost of that position. Tejanos who backed independence often found themselves distrusted from both sides. Mexico saw them as traitors, and many newly arrived Anglo settlers looked on them with suspicion or contempt. In the decades after the revolution, many Tejano families lost land and standing. Navarro's stand at the 1845 convention, and his later writings about Tejano history, can be read as an effort to keep his people inside the political community they had helped create.
That makes this monument part of a larger American conversation about who belongs in the founding story. The United States absorbed Texas, and later the wider Southwest, along with long-established Hispanic communities whose citizens had to argue for their place. Navarro is one of the earliest and most eloquent examples of that argument.
If you visit
This is one of the monuments placed in 1936 for the Texas Centennial, a statewide campaign that left a recognizable family of markers and memorials across Texas. If you have seen one of these Centennial pieces elsewhere, you may notice the family resemblance. They were meant to give the whole state a shared, permanent telling of its founding.
It is worth taking a moment with the place-name connection. You are standing in a city whose name Navarro chose himself, in a county that bears his name, both far to the north of his San Antonio home. Corsicana's name ties this North Texas town to a Mediterranean island, by way of a Tejano statesman and his immigrant father. Few town names carry that much history.
For a fuller road trip, pair this stop with San Antonio, where Navarro was born, lived and is buried. His former home there is preserved as Casa Navarro State Historic Site. Washington-on-the-Brazos, where he signed the Declaration, makes another natural stop. Together they trace his life from frontier province to statehood.
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
- · Jose Antonio Navarro
Related events
- · Signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Navarro County Courthouse
Corsicana, TX
Created by the first Texas Legislature in 1846 and named for independence signer José Antonio Navarro, Navarro County shuffled through a string of makeshift courthouses — settlers' homes, a log cabin, a building that burned in 1855, and an ornate 1880 design that was condemned by 1904 for being too small and structurally unsound. The present courthouse, designed by Dallas architect J. E. Flanders and finished in 1905, rose in red Burnet granite and gray brick in the grand Beaux Arts Classical Revival style, crowned by a clock dome and a columned entry. Its history is the story of a frontier county growing into permanence.
Thomas Ingles Smith
Corsicana, TX
Born in Virginia in 1800, Thomas Ingles Smith soldiered in the War of 1812 under his father before coming to Texas in 1836 to join the Republic's army. He was wounded at the Battle of the Salado in 1842 and figured in the "Archive War" when Austin residents blocked his Rangers from removing the Republic's records. A frontier Ranger, Indian scout, and treaty commissioner, he lent his name to Fort Smith and helped found Corsicana before his death in 1848.
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Corsicana, TX
In 1853 the Rev. John Patton and about twenty Cumberland Presbyterians organized Corsicana's first church, in the years when the town was still a young frontier settlement. Over the following decades several distinct Presbyterian bodies took root, split, and realigned, until in 1949 they merged into Westminster Presbyterian Church. The Bethel Mexican congregation joined in 1968, adding another strand to the church's history.
Site of the First Courthouse
Corsicana, TX
When the Texas Legislature designated Corsicana as the seat of Navarro County, the location was secured in 1848 through land donated by David R. Mitchell, James C. Neill, and Thomas Smith. The county's first true courthouse was a modest log cabin built here that year, just fifteen by seventeen feet, with the judge's stand in one corner and the county clerk's table in another. A two-story frame courthouse replaced the humble cabin in 1853.