Mina - Bastrop Pioneers Home
Bastrop, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On land granted 1835 to Greenlief Fisk, first district clerk of Bastrop County. Built 1836-37. Later home of two veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto-- Jesse Holderman, Campbell Taylor. [Recorded Texas Historic Landmark] (1964)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This home stands on land granted in 1835 to Greenlief Fisk, Bastrop County's first district clerk, and was built in 1836–37 in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas. It later became home to Jesse Holderman and Campbell Taylor, two veterans of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas independence. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.
Why it matters
A pioneer dwelling tied to San Jacinto veterans connects everyday frontier settlement to the decisive battle that founded the Republic of Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This home rose in the very first hours of the Republic of Texas. The land was granted to Greenlief Fisk in 1835, and the house went up in 1836 and 1837—the same short span in which Texas fought for and won its independence. To build a dwelling here then was an act of confidence in a country only weeks or months old.
Bastrop in those years sat on the edge of settled Texas, a river community where colonists cleared land, laid out the machinery of local government, and lived with the uncertainty of a frontier still contested. Greenlief Fisk served as the county's first district clerk, one of the officials whose record-keeping turned raw territory into an organized county with courts, deeds, and law.
The home's original name, tied to the early community here, reaches back to the Mexican-era colonial roots of the region before the town took its later form. In a single generation this stretch of the Colorado River passed from Mexican province to independent republic, and houses like this one were where that transformation was lived out day to day.
People & events
The story begins with Greenlief Fisk, who received this land in 1835 and became Bastrop County's first district clerk. In the young Republic, the clerk was the keeper of the county's memory—recording the cases, deeds, and decisions that gave a frontier community the structure of law. His grant and the house built upon it in 1836–37 mark him as one of the founders of ordered life here.
The home later sheltered two men whose names carry the Republic's defining moment: Jesse Holderman and Campbell Taylor, both veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto. That was the fight, in the spring of 1836, where Texan forces won the independence the young nation had declared. To have fought at San Jacinto was to have been present at the country's birth.
So this ordinary-looking dwelling gathered under one roof the two kinds of founding a new republic needs. Fisk represents the clerks and officials who built its institutions; Holderman and Taylor represent the soldiers who secured its existence. The house connects the daily work of settlement to the battlefield that made settlement possible.
Its place in the American story
The Republic of Texas stood as an independent nation for nearly a decade before joining the United States, and sites like this one are where that brief, consequential experiment took physical form. A house built in 1836–37, on land granted in 1835, is a document in wood of a country inventing itself.
San Jacinto belongs to the larger American story of continental expansion. The independence won on that field set in motion the events that would bring Texas into the Union and reshape the map of the young United States. When you learn that veterans of that battle lived in this home, the great turning point stops being an abstraction and becomes something that happened to real neighbors who then went home to farm and raise families.
That is the quiet power of a pioneer dwelling tied to a founding battle. It joins the sweep of national history—independence, annexation, expansion—to the intimate scale of one household, and reminds us that the people who made those events were the same people who cleared fields, kept records, and built houses along a river.
If you visit
Come to this spot thinking about how new everything was when the house was built. The Republic of Texas was barely on its feet, and to raise a home here in 1836–37 was to bet on a country whose survival was not yet certain. That sense of fragile beginnings is the feeling to carry as you look.
The marker notes the land grant of 1835, the building dates, and the two San Jacinto veterans who later lived here—read it slowly, because each line reaches back to the Republic's earliest days. The home was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964, one of the ways Texans have chosen to keep these founding-era places in memory.
Bastrop is rich in early-Republic history, and this site fits naturally into a day spent tracing how the county began. Stand here and imagine the men who had stood on the field at San Jacinto walking these same grounds afterward, ordinary in their daily lives yet bound forever to the battle that founded a nation.
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
- · Greenlief Fisk
- · Jesse Holderman
- · Campbell Taylor
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Thomas H. Mays
Bastrop, TX
Born in Virginia in 1802 and arriving in Texas from Tennessee in 1830, Thomas H. Mays became Bastrop's first municipal surveyor in 1834 and laid out the young town's streets. He was wounded in the leg at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 while serving with Edward Burleson's "Mina Volunteers," then returned to a life of public service as county deputy surveyor, city alderman, and associate justice. He and his wife raised their family on a large Bastrop homestead that included this site.
William Dunbar
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William Dunbar, born in Tennessee in 1819, was a member of the ill-fated Mier Expedition of 1842–43, when Texans crossed the Rio Grande in a raid against Mexico and were captured and imprisoned. He survived that ordeal and lived until 1855, his grave in Bastrop marking a participant in one of the Republic of Texas's most dramatic military misadventures.
Old Jenkins Home
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Raised around 1836 for Sarah Jenkins—widowed once by a frontier killing and again by the fall of the Alamo—this Bastrop-area home sheltered seven generations of a single family. Its men answered the call in nearly every American conflict from San Jacinto through both World Wars, and rode with the Texas Rangers besides. Few dwellings so completely fold the sweep of Texas and American military history into one household's story.
John Holland Jenkins
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This marker honors John Holland Jenkins, who as a young soldier fought in the San Jacinto campaign of the Texas War for Independence. The State of Texas erected the memorial in 1962 to commemorate his service. Jenkins later became known for his written recollections of frontier Texas life.