Site of the First Court House Built in Leon County
Leona, Leon County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Here a log building was erected in 1846. County officials installed Nov. 12, 1846: Geo. V. Lusk, Chief Justice Wm. Childress, Probate Judge Israel P. Reinhardt, County Clerk Wm. B. Middleton, Sheriff David Foster, Coroner Baxter King, Assessor and Col. Commissioners: John C. Smith Robert Steele Samuel Davis James Evans The county seat was moved in 1850 to Centerville.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Here in 1846 a simple log building became the first courthouse of newly organized Leon County, and that November its first officials—chief justice, sheriff, clerk, and commissioners—took their posts. The little seat of government at Leona lasted only until 1850, when the county seat moved on to Centerville. The site marks the earliest machinery of local government on this stretch of the Texas frontier.
Why it matters
The marker records the birth of county government in early statehood Texas, the grassroots institution-building that turned raw frontier into settled communities.
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Related people
- · Geo. V. Lusk
- · Wm. Childress
- · Israel P. Reinhardt
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Wm. B. Middleton
Leona, TX
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.
Leon County
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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
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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.
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