Leon County Courthouse
Centerville, Leon County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1887 of slate brick, locally made. One of oldest Texas courthouses still in its original state. County created in 1846. County seat was moved from Leona to Centerville in 1850. Two earlier courthouses have occupied this site. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1966
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1887 of locally made slate brick, the Leon County Courthouse is one of the oldest Texas courthouses still standing in its original form. The county dates to 1846, and its seat moved from Leona to Centerville in 1850, where two earlier courthouses stood on this same ground before it. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.
Why it matters
The county courthouse was the symbol and center of self-government on the Texas frontier, and the survivors from the 1880s are increasingly rare.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Fort Boggy
Centerville, TX
In 1840, settlers on the edge of the Republic of Texas raised a blockhouse here as headquarters for the Boggy and Trinity Rangers under Captain Thomas N. B. Greer. Meant to guard against raids in unsettled country, the post lent its name, Fort Boggy, to a community that lingered for years afterward.
Fort Boggy
Centerville, TX
Around 1840, pioneer families settling this corner of Leon County lived uneasily beside Kichai and Kickapoo camps. After Christopher C. Staley was killed while hunting in early 1840, the settlers built Fort Boggy—two blockhouses and eleven dwellings—under a company authorized by Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar and led by Captain Thomas Greer. Some seventy-seven people crowded inside, plagued more by illness than by raids, until the danger eased after Greer himself was killed in an 1841 attack.
Leon County
Leona, TX
Leon County was carved from Robertson County in 1846, the very year Texas joined the Union, and organized within months. It honors Martín de León, the Mexican empresario who founded Victoria and brought settlers to the region before the Republic. The county seat began at Leona before moving to Centerville in 1850.
John Durst
Leona, TX
John Durst arrived in 1821 among the earliest Anglo-American settlers of Mexican Texas, and by 1835 owned the Old Stone Fort in Nacogdoches, a hub of the tense years before the Texas Revolution. In 1844 he brought his family west to newly forming Leon County, where his wife Harriet is remembered as the county's first Anglo-American woman resident. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence, to honor a founding household of the frontier.