Stafford's Point
Stafford, Fort Bend County, Texas
Marker Inscription
One of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300," William J. Stafford (1764-1840), founded the settlement of Stafford's Point on the 6819.7-acre land grant he received in the winter of 1824. Bringing his family and slaves from his Louisiana sugar plantation, he was planting much land and had a sugar mill and cotton gin in operation by 1834. His manager, Clement c. Dyer (1800-64), a lawyer, political leader, and (later) county judge, married Stafford's daughter, Sarah (1809-74). Early residents of the Stafford's Point community included families of Sam Bell, Elijah Roark, Dr. P. W. Rose, Moses Shipman, and Mr. West. Dr. Rose, a former U. S. Army surgeon, tended the sick and also hired (1834) a teacher for his children and ten others studying in a one-room schoolhouse. In the "Runaway Scrape" of 1836, the settlers and their slaves fled east as Santa Anna's Army camped here, pillaging homes and mills. Stafford's Point was resettled after the War for Independence, and again prospered. The buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado, first railroad in Texas, was completed from Harrisburg to this village in 1853. From 1915 to 1925, a number of Sicilian families moved here from brazos County. Stafford's Point was incorporated into the town of Stafford in 1956.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
One of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists, William J. Stafford received a large land grant in 1824 and founded Stafford's Point, bringing his family and enslaved workers from a Louisiana sugar plantation. By the 1830s he had a sugar mill and cotton gin running, until Santa Anna's army camped and pillaged here during the 1836 Runaway Scrape. The settlement rebounded, gained Texas's first railroad in 1853, and later welcomed Sicilian immigrant families before being absorbed into the town of Stafford.
Why it matters
The site compresses the whole sweep of early Anglo-American Texas—Austin's colony, a slave-worked plantation economy, the trauma of the revolution, and the coming of the railroad—into a single settlement's story.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When William J. Stafford arrived on the coastal prairie southwest of present-day Houston in the 1820s, Texas was still part of newly independent Mexico. Mexico had opened its northern province to American settlers through the empresario system, and Stephen F. Austin's colony was the first and most famous of these grants. The colonists who received the first land titles became known as the "Old 300," a name that still carries real prestige in Texas.
The land here was rich, flat, and well watered: bottomland and prairie in the Brazos River country, suited to cotton and, on the wetter ground near the coast, to sugarcane. Many of Austin's settlers came from the American South and brought its plantation economy with them, including slavery. Mexican law on slavery was uneasy and shifting, and that tension became one of the fault lines that helped lead to revolution.
By the mid-1830s, relations between Anglo-American Texans and the government in Mexico City had broken down. When war came in 1835 and 1836, settlements like Stafford's Point sat directly in the path of the Mexican army moving east. After independence, the young Republic, and then the State, of Texas set about rebuilding, and the railroad era reached this part of the coastal plain in the 1850s.
People & events
William J. Stafford was already a man of middle age with a Louisiana sugar plantation behind him when he took up his large grant in Austin's colony. He brought his family and the people he enslaved, and within about a decade the place had a sugar mill and a cotton gin. It's worth saying plainly that the labor of enslaved men and women cleared these fields and ran those mills. Their names mostly went unrecorded, but the settlement's early prosperity rested on their work.
Stafford's manager, Clement C. Dyer, was a lawyer who went on to be a political leader and later a county judge. He married Stafford's daughter Sarah, which tied the plantation's management to the family. Around them grew a small community of neighboring families. One of them was Dr. P. W. Rose, a former U.S. Army surgeon who treated the sick and, in 1834, hired a teacher for a one-room school serving his own children and about ten others. That was an early sign that people here meant to stay.
Then came the spring of 1836. As Santa Anna's army pushed east after the fall of the Alamo, Texan families across the region abandoned their homes in a panicked flight that history remembers as the Runaway Scrape. The settlers of Stafford's Point and the people they held in bondage fled east. The Mexican army camped here and plundered homes and mills. After the Texan victory that spring, the families came back and the community prospered again. In 1853 it became the end of the line for the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado, the first railroad in Texas, built out from Harrisburg. In the early twentieth century, Sicilian families from Brazos County added a new chapter before Stafford's Point became part of the town of Stafford in 1956.
Its place in the American story
Stafford's Point shows in miniature how Texas became American. Austin's colony was a legal migration into Mexican territory that ended in revolution and, within a decade, annexation to the United States. That chain of events led directly to the U.S.-Mexican War and the redrawing of the continent's map.
The place also shows how deeply slavery was built into that expansion. The sugar and cotton plantations of the Texas coastal plain extended the Deep South's economy westward, and the question of slavery in new territories became the most explosive issue in American politics in the years before the Civil War.
Finally, the railroad's arrival in 1853 marks a turning point the whole country was living through. Rail lines were remaking trade, settlement, and the meaning of distance. Texas's first railroad reaching a farming village beside the Brazos was a local version of that national story. The Sicilian families who came in the 1900s, part of the great wave of immigration from southern Europe, show that these communities kept being remade by newcomers long after the frontier era.
If you visit
Today Stafford is part of the busy suburban corridor southwest of Houston, so you'll need some imagination to picture the sugar fields and prairie that once stretched out from here. That contrast is part of the reward: you are standing where a frontier plantation, an army's camp, and Texas's first railroad terminus all once existed.
Take a moment to think about the railroad. The tracks that still cross this part of Fort Bend County follow the general line of early rail routes out of the Houston area, and the old BBB&C helped set this region's direction. Watching a train pass, if you get the chance, connects you to the 1850s in a surprisingly direct way.
Stafford's Point works well as one stop on a Fort Bend County history drive. The surrounding Brazos country is full of markers about Austin's colonists and the Texas Revolution, and a day spent following them gives you a vivid sense of how this landscape shaped, and was shaped by, those early years.
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
- · Stephen F. Austin
- · William J. Stafford
- · Clement C. Dyer
Related events
- · Runaway Scrape
Themes & tags
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