The Guadalupe River
Seguin, Guadalupe County, Texas
Marker Inscription
One of the earliest explored rivers in Texas. Named for Our Lady of Guadalupe by Spaniard Alonso de Leon in 1689. During 1691-1693, Domingo Teran de Los Rios, Spanish Governor of Texas, maintained a colony on the Guadalupe. In early Anglo-American settlement, 30 or 40 families located along its bank, which formed a boundary of the Power-Hewetson Irish Colony. Near the mouth of the river, historic Victoria was founded, and 60 miles above was Gonzales, where the first shot for Texas freedom was fired, Oct. 2, 1835. The Guadalupe is 250 miles long. (1969)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Spanish explorer Alonso de León named this 250-mile river for Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1689, and within a few years Governor Domingo Terán de los Ríos kept a colony along its banks. Later it bounded the Power-Hewetson Irish colony and drew dozens of Anglo-American families to its shores. Near its mouth rose Victoria, and 60 miles upstream stood Gonzales, where the opening shot of the Texas Revolution rang out in October 1835.
Why it matters
The Guadalupe threads together three waves of Texas history — Spanish exploration, immigrant colonization, and the fight for independence — along a single waterway.
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Related people
- · Alonso de León
- · Domingo Terán de los Ríos
Related events
- · Battle of Gonzales (1835)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Campbell Cabin
Seguin, TX
Around 1850, Irish immigrant John Campbell is thought to have raised the first room of this log cabin near Seguin, then sailed home to persuade relatives—his brother Peter among them—to join him on the Texas frontier. Peter, a farmer and rancher, lived in the cabin and enlarged it as his family grew, and Campbell descendants kept it as a home until 1957. Relocated here in 1979, the humble structure survives as a tangible link to the region's immigrant pioneers.
Boecker Cemetery
Seguin, TX
When Friedrich Boecker was buried in 1880 in a corner of his 203-acre farm, he began what became a neighborhood cemetery for the German farm families nearby. Over the next fourteen years eleven more were laid to rest here before his son sold two acres to trustees in 1896, formally establishing Boecker Cemetery. A cemetery association formed in 1901, charging a modest membership fee that carried burial rights, and the grounds still serve the settlers' descendants today.
Friedens Church
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Friedens Church grew out of German mission work in the Guadalupe County countryside, organized in January 1896 at a local schoolhouse and formally constituted that March near Barbarossa. Under the pastorate of the Rev. C. R. Hempel, the congregation raised a modified Gothic sanctuary designed by Jacob Kiefer, dedicating it in the spring of 1905. Its founding officers and the family names on its cornerstone read as a roster of the surrounding German farming community.
Site of Dietz Community
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In 1851 the Jamaica-born land agent Jacob De Cordova settled beside good springs on the San Antonio Road, building a home that doubled as a stage stop and mail station. The land passed through a cluster of German bachelors—earning it names like "Nine Men's House"—before the Dietz brothers gave it their name and Johann Stautzenberger anchored it with a store, post office, and school. A singing society, the Frohsinn Maennerchor, and Friedens Church grew out of the little schoolhouse before consolidation, better roads, and the automobile quietly erased the town.