Stringtown
San Marcos, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John Drayton Pitts (1798-1861) was born, according to family lore, on a ship as his parents sailed to America. A civil engineer by profession, Pitts became interested in politics and in 1841 became a member of the Georgia House of Representatives. The next year, Pitts and his brother-in-law, James Vickers, took a trip to Texas and encouraged family and friends to follow. Eleven families, including those of John’s brothers, William and Edward, settled in Grimes County. John D. Pitts became an influential politician, living in Austin while serving as adjutant general. In 1847, Pitts and his friend, General Edward Burleson, visited the land Burleson acquired after the Battle of San Jacinto, located six miles southwest of San Marcos Springs. Impressed by the idyllic setting, Pitts purchased the 640 acres from Burleson. This early organized colony in Hays County consisted of family and friends of John D. Pitts. Their farmhouses, strung out at half-mile intervals along the Austin-San Antonio Road, led to the name Stringtown. The farms, often referred to as model farms, survived early hardships and the 1857 drought. Although not a town, Stringtown soon rivaled San Marcos in population. Pitts donated land near his home for a church and school. Following the Civil War and emancipation, crops were divided evenly with former slaves, and many were given land. The labor void was filled by Mexican farmers who brought their vibrant culture to the area. Pitts Cemetery, located nearby, was established in 1851. It serves as a reminder of the determined pioneers who settled the area and braved the hardships of early Texas. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
John Drayton Pitts, a civil engineer and Georgia legislator, visited Texas in 1842 and later bought 640 acres near San Marcos from General Edward Burleson, land the general had gained after the Battle of San Jacinto. The colony Pitts founded in 1847 drew family and friends who built farmhouses strung at half-mile intervals along the Austin–San Antonio Road, earning the settlement the name Stringtown. Its "model farms" survived early drought, and after emancipation crops were shared with former slaves given land, while Mexican farmers arrived to work the fields and enrich the area's culture.
Why it matters
Stringtown captures the organized kin-and-friend colonization of early Texas and the layered labor history—enslaved, freed, and Mexican—that reshaped the land after the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The country around San Marcos Springs has drawn people for as long as anyone can measure, and in the middle of the nineteenth century it drew a particular kind of newcomer: farmers looking for reliable water and good land on the edge of a fast-growing Texas. This was the age of organized settlement, when land that had recently changed hands through war and treaty was being surveyed, sold, and turned to the plow.
Geography shaped everything here. The old road linking Austin and San Antonio was the spine of this part of Texas, and settlements naturally arranged themselves along it. To build your farmhouse on that road was to stay connected to markets, mail, and neighbors in a country where isolation could be dangerous and ruinous. The very shape of this community — houses strung out at intervals along the route — grew straight out of that logic.
The era also brought hard tests. A severe drought in the late 1850s punished farmers across the region, and the coming of the Civil War would soon reorder the labor, economy, and society of the whole South, including these central Texas farms. The families who settled this ground had to be prepared to endure both the caprice of the weather and the upheavals of a nation about to tear itself apart.
People & events
At the center of this settlement stands John Drayton Pitts, a man whose life was itself a kind of American journey — born, as his family always told it, aboard a ship carrying his parents to a new country. Trained as a civil engineer, he was drawn into public life, served in the Georgia legislature, and in the early 1840s made the trip to Texas with his brother-in-law that would change the course of many families. He came home an evangelist for the new country, and eleven families, including his own brothers', answered the call and settled in Grimes County.
Pitts himself rose in the affairs of the young state, living for a time in Austin and serving in the office of adjutant general. But the settlement that bears the mark of his vision came from a visit in 1847 to land near San Marcos Springs — property his friend General Edward Burleson, the noted commander at the Battle of San Jacinto, had acquired. Taken with the setting, Pitts bought the acreage, and around it grew a colony of his kin and friends whose farmhouses, spaced along the Austin–San Antonio Road, gave the place its homespun name: Stringtown.
The colony's farms earned a reputation as model operations and outlasted the early hardships, including the punishing drought of the late 1850s, until the little community rivaled nearby San Marcos in population. Pitts gave land for a church and a school, the anchors of any settled place. He died in 1861, on the eve of the war — and so the changes that followed emancipation belonged to those who came after him. In the years after the Civil War, the Stringtown families divided their crops with the people they had formerly enslaved, and many of those freedpeople received land of their own, while Mexican farmers arriving to work the fields wove their culture into the life of the community.
Its place in the American story
Stringtown is a vivid case study in how much of Texas — and much of the American West — was actually settled: not by lone wanderers but by organized colonies of family and friends who moved together, pooled their courage, and recreated a familiar community on new ground. The chain that runs from a persuasive traveler to eleven relocating households to a thriving farm settlement is the westward story in miniature, and it played out thousands of times across the expanding nation.
The site also holds, in one small place, the layered and difficult labor history of the American South and Southwest. The same fields were worked first by enslaved people, then — after emancipation transformed the entire nation — by freedpeople who in some cases became landowners, and by Mexican families whose arrival reshaped the region's culture. Few local landmarks compress that national transition so plainly into a single stretch of farmland.
And in its cast of characters, Stringtown ties a quiet farming colony to the founding drama of Texas itself. The land came from a hero of San Jacinto; the colony's founder had served in the government of the young state. The grand events of independence and the humble work of raising crops turn out to be branches of the same story, meeting on a road between two Texas towns.
If you visit
There is no bustling town center to find here — and that is the point. Stringtown was never a town but a string of farms, so the thing to picture as you travel this part of Hays County is the old logic of the land: homesteads set at intervals along a vital road, each family close enough to help a neighbor yet spread across good farming ground. Once you see it that way, the ordinary countryside starts to tell its story.
A nearby pioneer cemetery, established early in the settlement's life, offers the most tangible link to the people who built this place. Cemeteries like it are where a vanished community keeps its memory, and reading the names is a way of meeting the determined families the marker honors.
This corner of central Texas sits in the green, spring-fed country between Austin and San Antonio, and it rewards travelers who leave the interstate for the older routes. Come with an eye for the land itself — the water, the road, the fields — and you will understand why a Georgia engineer stood here in 1847 and decided this was the place.
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
- · John Drayton Pitts
- · Edward Burleson
Themes & tags
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