Site of Fort Boggy
Centerville, Leon County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Here a blockhouse was constructed in 1840 as headquarters for the Boggy and Trinity Rangers commanded by Captain Thomas N. B. Greer. A community retained the name Fort Boggy for a number of years.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Frontier ranger posts like this one marked the tense boundary between settlement and open country in the young Republic, where protection and pioneering went hand in hand.
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Related people
- · Thomas N. B. Greer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
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Illinois-born William B. Middleton took part in the ill-fated Mier Expedition of 1842, a Republic of Texas raid across the Rio Grande that ended in capture and imprisonment in Mexico, and later became the first sheriff of Leon County. The marker also remembers Beoni Middleton, who died in a Mexican prison as a captive of that same expedition.
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