Site of Cameron, First County Seat of DeWitt County
Cuero, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This site was chosen in June 1846 as the first seat of DeWitt County and named for Capt. Ewen Cameron (1811-43), slain prisoner of the Mier Expedition. Although a town was platted on the 100-acre tract donated by Joseph Tumlinson, a log courthouse and a county clerk's office were the only buildings erected. In 1850, after four elections and four court decisions, Cameron lost the title of county seat to the nearby town of Clinton. County offices moved to Cuero in 1876.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Chosen in 1846 as DeWitt County's first seat of justice, the town of Cameron honored Captain Ewen Cameron, a prisoner of the ill-fated Mier Expedition who was executed on Santa Anna's order. Though platted on a hundred donated acres, it never grew beyond a log courthouse and clerk's office, and after four elections and four court fights it lost the county seat to Clinton in 1850.
Why it matters
The rise and quick fall of Cameron reflects how fiercely early Texas communities competed for the county seats that determined which towns would survive.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In June 1846 Texas had been a state for only a few months, and the United States and Mexico had just gone to war. Back home, Texans were busy with a more local kind of nation-building: organizing new counties, drawing boundaries, and deciding where courthouses would be.
DeWitt County was created that year and named for empresario Green DeWitt, whose colony had brought early Anglo-American settlers to this part of Texas. A new county needed a county seat, and in frontier Texas the town that won that title usually became the center of trade, law, and population.
That is why choosing a county seat was so often a fight. Landowners, merchants, and settlers all knew that the courthouse brought roads, business, and rising land values. Towns that lost it frequently disappeared.
People & events
The first seat of DeWitt County was named for Captain Ewen Cameron. Born in 1811, he was one of the best-known figures in the Mier Expedition of 1842. After the Texans surrendered at Mier, the prisoners made a mass escape, but most were recaptured. In the grim drawing of beans that followed, Cameron survived the lottery, only to be executed later on Santa Anna's orders in 1843. For Texans, his name stood for courage and sacrifice.
Joseph Tumlinson donated a 100-acre tract for the new town, and a town was laid out on it. But Cameron never really became a town. Only a log courthouse and a county clerk's office were ever built.
The struggle over the county seat that followed was fierce. It took four elections and four court decisions to settle it, and in 1850 Cameron lost the seat to nearby Clinton. The story continued after that: county offices moved again, to Cuero, in 1876. Today Cameron survives mainly as a name on a marker.
Its place in the American story
Cameron's short life as a county seat shows a pattern that repeated across the growing United States. From Ohio to Kansas to Texas, towns fought over county seats with elections, lawsuits, and sometimes outright trickery, because winning could mean survival and losing could mean fading away. Many American ghost towns are former or would-be county seats.
The town's name ties it to a larger story. The Mier Expedition and Cameron's execution left deep bitterness toward Mexico. In 1846, with the two countries at war, naming a county seat after a martyr of Mier was both a tribute and a statement.
The sequence from Cameron to Clinton to Cuero also reflects how transportation and commerce kept redrawing the map. Settlements rose and fell as routes and markets shifted, and the town that looked like the center in one decade could be abandoned by the next.
If you visit
There is no town left to see here, and that is the point of the stop. Stand at the site and try to picture a log courthouse and a clerk's office sitting on a hundred acres that were meant to become a city. Ghost-town sites like this reward a little imagination.
Nearby Cuero is the county seat today. Visiting it finishes the story that began at Cameron, from the first log courthouse to the town that eventually won the title.
The marker fits nicely into a drive through the old DeWitt Colony country of South Central Texas, with its rolling pastures and small towns. Families can make a game of it: talk about what makes one town grow and another vanish, and look for clues to that answer along the road.
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
- · Ewen Cameron
- · Joseph Tumlinson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
De Witt County
Cuero, TX
This ground lay within Green De Witt's 1825 empresario grant and became DeWitt County in 1846, its seat shifting from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero in 1876. Settled first by Anglo-Americans and, by 1860, half by German immigrants, the county sent its men into nearly every fight of the Texas Revolution — the Alamo, Goliad, Gonzales, and San Jacinto among them. The marker rolls out a long honor list of the pioneers and soldiers who founded and defended it.
Taylor Family Cemetery
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Also called Taylor-Bennett Cemetery, this DeWitt County burial ground began with Josiah Taylor, whose grave from 1830 is its oldest. Taylor first entered Texas in 1812 with the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, fighting at La Bahía and in the battles of Rosillo and Alazán Creek, then settled with his family as part of the DeWitt Colony in 1829. His descendants included Texas Rangers, veterans of the Texas Revolution, and participants in the Runaway Scrape, and among those buried here are men killed in the notorious Sutton-Taylor Feud.
Josiah Taylor
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Josiah Taylor's life traces the violent birth of Texas across three decades. He first rode into the province in 1812 with the Gutiérrez-Magee filibuster, an armed bid to pry Mexico from Spanish rule, and was wounded repeatedly at the disastrous Battle of Medina. Returning with his family in the 1820s, he took a headright in Green DeWitt's colony, and by 1842 five of his sons were riding with Jack Hays' Rangers against a Mexican invasion.
Allen Caruthers
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Born in Kentucky in 1804, Allen Caruthers fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that won Texas its independence. He and his wife Martha, a North Carolina native, were among the settlers who built lives in the young republic and state before his death in 1863. Their graves near Cuero mark the resting place of one of the veterans whose service is woven into the founding story of Texas.