Baron de Bastrop Monument

The baron was no baron. He was born Philip Hendrik Nering Bogel in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, on November 23, 1759, and became collector general of taxes for the province of Friesland. Accused in 1793 of embezzling tax funds, he fled before trial; when a Leeuwarden court offered 1,000 gold ducats for his return, he took the title Baron de Bastrop. By April 1795 he was in Spanish Louisiana, passing as a Dutch nobleman. Records found in the Netherlands within the last half-century finally explained his origins.

What the plaque says

Baron de Bastrop Monument Erected in recognition of the distinguished service to Texas of Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, 1770-1829. Pioneer Red River empresario, land commissioner of Austin's colony, member of the Congress of Coahuila and Texas. Through his aid, Moses Austin secured from the Spanish government in 1821, the first contract for the Anglo-American colonization of Texas. In his honor, the name of this town and that of this county, a part of Austin's 1821 grant, known as the municipality of Mina in 1834 and the County of Mina after March 17, 1836, was changed on December 18, 1837 to Bastrop. Let this name bring to mind the friend and advocate of the pioneer in a foreign land.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 1.9 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 20 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 25 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 26 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Home Town of Texas Confederate Major Joseph D. Sayers — steps away
• Captain James Burleson — steps away
• First National Bank of Bastrop — steps away
• Bastrop Methodist Church — 0.3 mi