Randon & Pennington Grant of 1824
Fulshear, Fort Bend County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1821, Stephen F. Austin was granted a permit from the Mexican government to act as empresario for 300 families to settle in Texas. That summer, he and the settlers, known as the Old Three Hundred, began crossing into Texas. From 1823 to 1824, Austin and the Commissioner of Colonization for Texas, Felipe Enrique Neri, the Baron de Bastrop, issued 272 land grants, 56 of which were situated on the banks of the Brazos and San Bernard Rivers in what became Fort Bend County in 1837. On August 3, 1824, David Randon and his business partner, Isaac Pennington, received a grant of 4,428 acres located on the Brazos River in Fort Bend County between the John Foster League to the east and the Churchill Fulshear League to the west. The Randon and Pennington Land Grant offered fertile soil and valued river access for the transportation of crops to market. David Randon, a native of Alabama and part Creek Indian, came to Texas in search of opportunity. Randon received his land grant as a single man, but by March 1826, he was recorded as having a wife, Nancy McNeel, daughter of John McNeel, a land grant recipient in Brazoria County. Randon soon became one of the most successful planters in Austin’s colony. He died in 1867 and is buried on the Dyer Moore ranch near the community of Orchard. Isaac Pennington, a native of Virginia, sold his interest in the land to Randon. Pennington was listed as a teacher as early as 1823-24, making him one of the earliest teachers in the colony. He was later the mail contractor on the route between independence and Milam in 1836. The Randon and Pennington land grant became an important part of the early development of Texas and Fort Bend County.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When Stephen F. Austin won a Mexican permit to settle 300 families in Texas, he and Baron de Bastrop issued 272 land grants between 1823 and 1824, many along the Brazos and San Bernard rivers. In August 1824 David Randon—an Alabama native of part-Creek descent—and his partner Isaac Pennington received 4,428 fertile acres on the Brazos, prized for river access to markets. Randon grew into one of the colony's most successful planters, while Pennington, one of the colony's earliest teachers, sold out his share and later carried the mail on a Texas post route.
Why it matters
The grant illustrates how Austin's Old Three Hundred laid the property foundations of Anglo Texas, opening the fertile river bottoms that would drive the region's plantation economy.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1821, Texas was not part of the United States — it was the far northern frontier of a Mexico newly independent from Spain. Eager to populate its sparsely settled lands, the Mexican government turned to a system of empresarios, agents granted the authority to bring in colonists. Stephen F. Austin received a permit to settle 300 families, and that summer he and the settlers who became known as the Old Three Hundred began crossing into Texas.
The land they came for was some of the best in the region: the bottomlands of the Brazos and San Bernard Rivers, where fertile soil and river access promised both good crops and a way to carry them to market. Between 1823 and 1824, Austin and the colonization commissioner, Felipe Enrique Neri — better known as the Baron de Bastrop — issued 272 land grants, 56 of them clustered along those two rivers in what would become Fort Bend County in 1837.
This was the ground floor of Anglo settlement in Texas, more than a decade before the Texas Revolution and independence. Every grant recorded a family's gamble that a stretch of Mexican frontier could be turned into a home, a farm, and a future.
People & events
On August 3, 1824, two business partners — David Randon and Isaac Pennington — received a grant of 4,428 acres on the Brazos River, sitting between the John Foster League to the east and the Churchill Fulshear League to the west. The land offered exactly what a colonist prized: rich soil and a river to move crops to market.
David Randon's story carries the mixed heritage of the American frontier. A native of Alabama and, by the record, part Creek Indian, he came to Texas as a single man in search of opportunity. He found it. By March 1826 he had married Nancy McNeel, daughter of another land-grant recipient over in Brazoria County — the kind of union that knit the young colony's founding families together — and he grew into one of the most successful planters in Austin's colony. He died in 1867 and was buried on a ranch near the community of Orchard.
His partner, Isaac Pennington, took a different path. A Virginian, he is recorded as a teacher as early as 1823–24, which makes him one of the very earliest teachers in the whole colony — a reminder that even a raw frontier needed schooling from the start. Pennington sold his interest in the land to Randon and later, in 1836, worked as a mail contractor on the route between Independence and Milam, helping stitch the scattered settlements together with something as basic and vital as the delivery of letters.
Its place in the American story
The Old Three Hundred occupy a founding place in Texas history comparable to the earliest colonists elsewhere in America — the first families whose land grants laid the legal and economic groundwork for everything that followed. This grant is one thread in that origin story, showing exactly how empty-looking frontier became titled property, planted fields, and eventually counties and towns.
It also captures the larger arc of American westward expansion in miniature. Ambitious newcomers of varied backgrounds — a part-Creek Alabamian, a Virginia schoolteacher — moved into a borderland under a foreign flag, bound themselves to it with land and marriage, and helped build a society that would, within little more than a decade, break from Mexico and later join the United States.
There is a sober dimension to this founding, too. The fertile river bottoms these grants opened would drive a plantation economy, and the wealth of successful planters like Randon rested on that agricultural system. The same rivers that carried crops to market carried the region toward the world of large estates and enslaved labor that shaped antebellum Texas — a full accounting of what these first grants set in motion.
If you visit
Come to this spot near Fulshear ready to read the landscape rather than a building, because what the marker commemorates is the land itself — a grant of Brazos River bottomland issued two centuries ago. Picture the boundaries the inscription names, with the Foster league to the east and the Fulshear league to the west, and you begin to see how the whole county was first drawn as a patchwork of these early leagues.
The Brazos is the key character here. Stand where you can sense the river's course and imagine why colonists prized this ground: the water was the highway, the soil was the promise, and together they made a place worth crossing an international border to claim. That combination is the reason Fort Bend County exists.
Make this a stop on a broader tour of the county's founding era. The names on this marker echo across the region — Fulshear itself carries one of them — and tracing them from grant to town to modern map turns a quiet roadside sign into a doorway on the very beginning of Anglo Texas. Read it, look to the river, and let two hundred years of history open out from a single 1824 land grant.
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
- · David Randon
- · Isaac Pennington
- · Stephen F. Austin
- · Baron de Bastrop
Themes & tags
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