The Gault Homestead
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Included as part of a 320-acre land grant awarded to J. P. Whelin in payment for his service to the Republic of Texas Army, this property has had a long and varied history. Soon after he was granted the land, Whelin sold it to Nathaniel C. Raymond, who in turn sold it to John M. Gault two years later. Gault built a log cabin on the Whelin grant in the 1850s, and he and his family established a farm. In 1855 they purchased adjoining land from Captain Nelson Merrill and soon thereafter built a larger home on that tract of land. Gault died about 1865 and was buried in Merrilltown Cemetery. The homestead property remained in his family until 1892, when it was sold to William and Edna Graves. They maintained the Gault homestead as tenant property for a number of years, during which the original cabin was enlarged with a board-and-batten addition. R. C. Cox acquired the property in 1929, and his family lived in the cabin through the following decade. After a succession of owners, the Gault homestead became part of a modern housing development in the 1980s. It remains as a reminder of the Merrilltown community and of the county's early rural heritage. (1990)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the decades after Texas won its independence, land granted for service to the young Republic passed through several owners before John Gault built a log cabin here in the 1850s and raised a farming family. The homestead anchored the small rural community of Merrilltown, and its modest cabin grew with later additions as it changed hands across the generations. By the 1980s the surrounding fields had given way to suburban Austin, leaving the old place as a survivor of the county's pioneer countryside.
Why it matters
It traces Central Texas from Republic-era land grants and frontier farmsteads to modern suburban sprawl, preserving the memory of a vanished rural community.
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Related people
- · John M. Gault
- · J. P. Whelin
- · Nathaniel C. Raymond
- · Nelson Merrill
Related events
- · Republic of Texas land grants
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Merrilltown Cemetery
Austin, TX
Captain Nelson Merrell settled here in 1837, opening a store and post office and giving his name to the Merrilltown community. He deeded land for a church, a school, and this burial ground, served as a Travis County commissioner, helped build Congress Avenue in Austin, and led a company of Rangers guarding the settlement. The cemetery's graves—marked by obelisks, fraternal-order stones, and curbing—hold community leaders and veterans reaching back to the Civil War.
Bratton Cemetery
Round Rock, TX
John Bratton brought his family from Kentucky to Texas in the late 1830s and later set aside an acre of his land as a burying ground for kin and neighbors. Many of the more than one hundred graves are marked only with rough fieldstones, and most date to the 1800s. As one of the area's oldest cemeteries, it records the short lives and hardships of a frontier community.
Fortress Home
Austin, TX
Martin Wieland, a settler from Dessau, Germany, built this sturdy home in the early 1850s on the Central Texas frontier, where it doubled as a place of refuge for neighbors in times of danger. Successive enlargements in 1873 and 1912 show how the household and community grew alongside it. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.
Dessau Cemetery
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Established around 1874 in what is now northeast Austin, Dessau Cemetery served a farming community settled in the years after the Civil War, when German and other families worked the blackland prairie of Travis County. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery preserves it as a record of that early rural settlement.