Stewart Property
Galveston, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
One of the earliest known sites of occupation on the west end of Galveston Island, this ridge was at one time a campsite for the nomadic Karankawa Indians. The property was purchased in 1856 by Col. Warren D. c. Hall (1788-1867), veteran of several military expeditions and the Texas revolution. The estate was named "Mottexas" under the next owner, Galveston attorney Col. Marcus F. Mott (1837-1906). His home burned in 1925 and the land was then purchased by prominent businessman George Sealy, Jr. (1880-1944), who built a home here and named the site "Isla Ranch." Association of the property with the Stewart name began in 1933 when Maco Stewart, Sr. (1871-1938), a native Galvestonian and organizer of the Stewart Title Company, acquired the site. Maco Stewart, Jr. (1896-1950) received the estate in 1940 and made several changes to the house while operating a ranch on the acreage. In 1944 Stewart deeded the land to the University of Texas, which used the property in connection with its Galveston medical branch until 1967. The Stewart property has revealed much about the island's heritage through its association with individuals and families involved in the growth and development of Galveston.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This ridge on the west end of Galveston Island holds one of the area's oldest known histories of human use — once a campsite for the seagoing Karankawa people — before it passed through a striking succession of nineteenth- and twentieth-century owners. Texas Revolution veteran Col. Warren D. C. Hall bought it in 1856; later owners named it "Mottexas" and "Isla Ranch," and in 1933 it took the name of Galvestonian Maco Stewart, founder of the Stewart Title Company. The land was eventually deeded to the University of Texas for its Galveston medical branch, layering Indigenous, frontier, and modern uses on a single stretch of shore.
Why it matters
The property is a palimpsest of Galveston history, where the island's Karankawa past and its later ranching, legal, and educational chapters all meet on one piece of ground.
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Related people
- · Warren D. C. Hall
- · Marcus F. Mott
- · George Sealy, Jr.
- · Maco Stewart
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
West Galveston Island
Galveston, TX
The earliest known inhabitants of West Galveston Island were the Karankawa people, and it was near here that the shipwrecked Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca came ashore in 1528, the first European known to reach the island. Over the centuries that followed the island saw explorers, the pirate Jean Lafitte, stagecoach and ferry travel down its beaches, and a grim role in the illegal slave trade as a landing point for traffickers barred from Galveston's harbor. By the twentieth century it had become a haven for migratory shorebirds and, since 1957, a booming resort coast.
Lafitte's Grove
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Karankawa Campsite
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This coastal site was one of several campsites and burial grounds of the Karankawa, the nomadic people who lived along the Texas Gulf and drew their survival from its waters. They aided the shipwrecked Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 but resisted later intruders, from La Salle's 1685 French expedition onward. Devastated by disease and conflict with pirates and Anglo-American settlers, the Karankawa had all but vanished from Texas by the 1840s; the campsite was rediscovered in 1962.
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