Stage Lines Through Columbus
Columbus, Colorado County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Stage Lines Through Columbus Nineteenth-century stagecoach operations in Texas were closely tied to mail delivery, and contracts with the U.S. Postal Service more often than not made the transportation of passengers and freight by stage economically feasible. As an early community on the transportation routes between Houston and San Antonio and between Houston and Austin, Columbus saw many stage lines travel its streets in the years between Texas Independence and the end of the Civil War. The Brown and Tarbox Stage Service was underway by 1847, carrying mail from Houston to San Antonio, passing through Columbus. Prominent stagecoach operators Sawyer and Risher (later Risher and Hall) utilized several lines that began in Eagle Lake and traveled through Columbus to San Antonio, Austin and Wharton. By November 1861, the Confederate States Mail Service replaced U.S. mail operations in Texas, and the stage lines continued to carry this mail as well. Traffic also developed between the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado railroad terminus at nearby Alleyton and the cotton shipping points of Brownsville and Matamoros. Stages from Brownsville connected with stage lines from Corpus Christi, Goliad and Victoria to San Antonio via Columbus. After the Civil War, Risher and Hall resumed operations of their stage lines to San Antonio, but the coming of the railroad soon signaled the end of the stagecoach era in this part of Texas. As a stop on many of the stage routes, Columbus played a significant role in this early transportation network. (2002)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Before railroads, Columbus sat on the busy stage routes linking Houston with San Antonio and Austin, and the coaches ran because they carried the mail as much as passengers. From the Brown and Tarbox service of the 1840s through the Confederate mail years of the war, operators like Sawyer and Risher threaded their lines through town, even connecting to the cotton-shipping traffic bound for the Rio Grande. The coming of the railroad after the Civil War ended the era.
Why it matters
Columbus illustrates how mail contracts, not passengers, underwrote overland travel in early Texas — and how quickly the railroad erased a whole transportation world.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Colorado County, City of Columbus
Columbus, TX
Columbus traces its roots to 1823, when Stephen F. Austin eyed the site — shown on his 1835 map as Montezuma — for his colony's capital. The provisional government created the municipality of Colorado in January 1836 and ordered the town laid out as its seat; that spring the county was born and the town soon incorporated. As a railroad terminal from 1869 to 1873 it thrived as a trading hub, and its marker honors generations of pioneers, defenders of Gonzales, San Jacinto veterans, Confederate officers, and citizens of distinction who called the county home.
The Columbus Tap Railway
Columbus, TX
When the state's pioneering Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado railroad routed its Houston-to-Austin line through nearby Alleyton and bypassed Columbus in the 1850s, local planters and merchants fought back by chartering their own Columbus Tap Railway in 1860 to connect the two. The Civil War intervened; though the Confederacy found the line useful and even impressed labor to work its roadbed in 1863, it went unfinished during the fighting. Completed after the war, it eventually folded into the Southern Pacific system.
Joseph Jefferson Mansfield
Columbus, TX
Born in West Virginia in 1861 to a Confederate colonel killed soon after his birth, Joseph Jefferson Mansfield came to Texas in 1881 and built a career in Eagle Lake and Columbus as lawyer, editor, mayor, and county judge. Elected to Congress in 1916, he chaired the House Rivers and Harbors Committee, steering federal money toward flood control on the Colorado River—work commemorated in the naming of Mansfield Dam. Late in life he gave his Columbus property to the town for a public library, and when he died in 1947 mourners including future president Lyndon B. Johnson gathered for his funeral.
City of Columbus
Columbus, TX
Around Christmas 1821, the Kuykendall brothers and Daniel Gilleland settled at an old Indian campground on the Mexico-to-Sabine trail, at a spot Stephen F. Austin had already marked as promising. Austin and the Baron de Bastrop surveyed the land in 1823, making this the oldest surveyed and platted Anglo-American town in Texas, home to many of Austin's "Old 300" colonists. Burned by the retreating Texas Army in 1836 to deny it to Santa Anna, the town rose again after the victory at San Jacinto and was replatted in 1837.