William B. DeWees

🏛️The era

In 1822, the year William B. DeWees arrived, Texas belonged to a Mexico that had only just won independence from Spain. The new government let Anglo-American settlers in through empresarios, agents who were granted the right to bring in colonists. The best known was Stephen F. Austin, who settled families along the lower Brazos and Colorado Rivers.

Austin's first settlers became known as the 'Old 300.' They took on a hard life of clearing land, putting up cabins and starting farms in river bottoms far from American towns. In return they received land grants that were generous by the standards of the time.

By the 1830s, tensions between the colonists and the Mexican government had grown into open revolution. In early 1836, after the fall of the Alamo, a Mexican army moved east across the settlements. Thousands of Texian families fled ahead of it, and Texans came to call that flight the Runaway Scrape. Many towns were abandoned or burned along the way.

👥People & events

William B. DeWees was born in 1799 and came to Texas from Kentucky as a young man of about twenty-three. In 1824 he received a large land grant as one of Austin's Old 300, which put him among the founding families of Anglo Texas.

He made his living as a blacksmith and trader, and both trades mattered a great deal in a frontier colony. A blacksmith shaped and mended the tools, plows and hardware that farm life ran on. A trader linked isolated households to goods from far away. Men like DeWees helped hold a community together.

During the revolution in 1836, Columbus was burned. Once the war was over, DeWees helped start the town again. He laid out the new town that is today's Columbus and gave land for a courthouse and a school, building a community along with his own home place.

He also wrote things down. His letters to a friend were published in 1852 as 'Letters from an Early Settler of Texas to a Friend.' They describe colonial life and the panic of the Runaway Scrape as someone who lived through them saw it. Like any memoir that went through an editor and a publisher, they're best read with care, but they're still a valued window onto those years.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Austin's colony was the seed of Anglo-American Texas. That Texas would break from Mexico, become an independent republic, and join the United States in 1845, changing the shape of the country. As one of the Old 300, DeWees belonged to the first chapter of that story.

His letters add something rarer. Most frontier settlers left almost no written record, so we know them mainly from land papers and census entries. An eyewitness account of something like the Runaway Scrape gives us the fear, confusion and hardship of ordinary families, not just the moves of armies and generals.

His gifts of land for a courthouse and a school point to a pattern that repeated across the American frontier. Settlers rebuilding after a disaster put civic life first. A courthouse meant law and a school meant a future, and DeWees made room for both.

🧭If you visit

Columbus sits on the Colorado River, the same river along which Austin's colonists settled two centuries ago. Picture the bottomlands as they once were, with scattered cabins, cleared fields, and a blacksmith's forge ringing somewhere close by.

Stroll the town and think about its layout. The present Columbus is the town DeWees laid out after the old one burned, and the courthouse and school both stand on ground tied to his gifts. The courthouse square is a good place to start.

Columbus is an easy stop along the corridor between Houston and San Antonio. It suits a road trip built around the Texas Revolution and Austin's colony. If you enjoy first-person history, look for DeWees's published letters before or after your visit. Reading them in the town he helped rebuild brings his world into focus.