Site of the Home of Thomas J. Rusk

Nacogdoches, TX

Around 1788–91, civic and military leader Don Antonio Gil Y'Barbo built a stone house at the crossing of El Camino Real and La Calle del Norte, its walls quarried from local glauconite. Over the next century the building served as home, store, courthouse, jail, saloon, and fortress against filibustering raids, and Sam Houston opened his first Texas law office here in 1833. Demolished in 1902, its stones were reused for a faithful replica built in 1936 on the Stephen F. Austin campus.

Nacogdoches, TX

Thomas Jefferson Rusk passed the bar at twenty-one and, drawn to Nacogdoches, threw himself into the Texas independence movement, signing the Declaration of Independence and serving as secretary of war. He fought beside Sam Houston at San Jacinto and briefly commanded the Republic's army, then helped bring Texas into the Union and served in the U.S. Senate, where he worked to fix the state's boundary and promote a transcontinental railroad. Grief-stricken after his wife's death, the ailing statesman took his own life in 1857.

Nacogdoches, TX

A native son of Nacogdoches, Juan Antonio Padilla rose to serve as land commissioner in 1829 and as vice-governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, then took an active part in the Texas Revolution. He died in Houston in 1839, and his wife, Maria Montes del Padilla, died at their Nacogdoches home in 1846. A 1936 state marker honors the site where they lived.

Nacogdoches, TX

Once called the "American Cemetery," Oak Grove sits on land granted in 1826 to empresario Haden Edwards, leader of the Fredonian Rebellion, who is buried here. Its graves read like a roster of the Texas Republic: signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, veterans of San Jacinto, Sam Houston's secretary of war and personal physician, early millionaires, a master architect, and formerly enslaved men and women. Burials relocated from an older Spanish cemetery reach back to a stone marked "Father Mendoza, 1718."