Site of the Home of Reuben Hornsby
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Site of the Home Built in 1832 by Reuben Hornsby (1793-1879) and his wife Sarah Morrison Hornsby (1796-1862). Second built in "Austin's Little Colony". First in the present county of Travis. Famed for Christian hospitality. Here Josiah Wilbarger recovered after being scalped in 1833. Mr. Hornsby and his sons fought in many Indian battles and served as scouts in Capt. John J. Tumlinson's company of Rangers which was orgianized here in 1836. Erected by the State of Texas 1936
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Reuben Hornsby and his wife Sarah built this home in 1832, the first in what is now Travis County and part of Stephen F. Austin's colonizing effort on the Texas frontier. Renowned for their hospitality, the Hornsbys nursed Josiah Wilbarger here after he was scalped and left for dead in 1833. Hornsby and his sons rode as Rangers and Indian fighters, and Captain John J. Tumlinson's company was organized on this very ground in 1836.
Why it matters
The homestead is a window onto the violent, precarious edge of Anglo settlement in early Texas, where farming, hospitality, and frontier warfare were inseparable.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1830s, the land that is now Travis County was not yet part of any county, any state, or any settled map — it was the far frontier of Stephen F. Austin's colony, the leading edge of Anglo-American settlement pushing into Mexican Texas. Families arrived under the empresario system, granted land in exchange for the promise to farm it and stay. What they found was fertile ground, deep river bottoms, and a country already lived in by Native peoples who had no intention of ceding it.
This was the homestead built in 1832 in that outlying district known as "Austin's Little Colony" — the first home raised in what would become Travis County. To build here was to gamble everything on a place with no neighbors nearby, no soldiers, and no guarantee of another season.
Life on this edge braided together things we now think of as separate: clearing fields, raising children, offering shelter to strangers, and taking up arms. There was no line between the domestic and the dangerous. The same household that was famous for its hospitality also stood watch against attack.
People & events
The home was built by Reuben Hornsby and his wife Sarah Morrison Hornsby, and it became a byword for open-handed welcome on a frontier where a traveler's next meal was never certain. In an isolated country, a household known for taking people in was a kind of institution — a fixed point of safety in unmapped land.
The most famous story tied to this ground is that of Josiah Wilbarger, who was scalped and left for dead in 1833 and yet, remarkably, recovered under the Hornsbys' care. He survived his terrible wounds and lived on for years afterward — one of those episodes that seems too harrowing to be true and yet is well attested in the record of early Texas.
The household was also a base for the armed men who patrolled this frontier. Reuben Hornsby and his sons rode as scouts and fighters, and in 1836 a company of Rangers under Captain John J. Tumlinson was organized on this very spot. The clashes of those years were part of a long, two-sided struggle over the land itself, as settlers pressed in and the Native peoples already there fought to hold their ground.
Its place in the American story
The westward push that reshaped the American map is often told in grand strokes — treaties, purchases, migrations. This homestead shows what it actually looked like at the point of contact: one family, one cabin, and a frontier that could turn from peaceful to violent in an afternoon.
It is also a window onto the origins of the Texas Rangers, one of the oldest and most storied law-and-defense forces in North America. Long before they became legend, they were neighbors and sons mustering at a farmhouse to guard scattered settlements. That a Ranger company was organized on this ground ties an ordinary homestead to an institution that outlived the republic itself.
And the story carries a harder truth about expansion. The safety this household offered to some travelers came at the direct expense of the peoples being displaced. The frontier was not empty land waiting to be filled; it was contested country, and the violence recorded here ran in both directions.
If you visit
Notice the marker's own vintage: it was raised by the State of Texas in 1936, during the state's centennial, when Texans set stone across the countryside to fix their founding memories in place. Reading it, you are seeing the frontier as the 1930s chose to remember it — a reminder that markers are historical objects too, with a point of view.
Stand here and take in the setting. This was chosen ground — near water, near good bottomland — for very practical reasons, and those reasons are still legible in the landscape if you look for them. Picture the nearest neighbor being miles away, and how much a welcoming door would have meant.
This is a good stop for anyone drawn to the human texture of early Texas rather than its battles alone. Come for the survival story and the famous hospitality, but leave thinking about the fuller, more difficult picture the ground holds — a place where farming, welcome, and warfare were all the same life.
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
- · Reuben Hornsby
- · Sarah Morrison Hornsby
- · Josiah Wilbarger
- · John J. Tumlinson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
To John Williams and Howell Haggett
Austin, TX
This marker remembers rangers killed in the dangerous early years of the Republic. John Williams and Howell Haggett died in a May 1836 encounter with Indians while detailed from Captain John J. Tumlinson's company to protect the Hornsby settlement's families returning from the panicked flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Pioneer ranger William Atkinson fell in a similar clash in 1845. The State of Texas placed the monument in 1936.
To Josephus Hornsby
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Josephus Hornsby, son of pioneer Reuben Hornsby, grew up on the exposed Colorado River frontier east of Austin, settling in 1832. As a young Ranger he fought in the Indian and Mexican clashes of the Republic era — the Flores and Brush fights, Plum Creek in 1840, and the Vasquez and Woll campaigns — and in 1842 rescued two captives from an Indian raid in Austin.
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