Benjamin Beason's Crossing of the Colorado River

Both plaques end with the fire of March 1836; the family's story ran on. After the 1824 title Benjamin Beason moved his household, a wife, six children, a hired hand and seven enslaved people, to the west bank. By April 1836 Elizabeth kept a boarding house at Harrisburg. That September some of the enslaved people escaped, and sons Leander and Collins rode after them; past the Guadalupe, Indians fired on them and killed Collins. Benjamin was dead by March 1837, and that December Leander shot Naham Mixon in the back during a quarrel. He was acquitted in 1838.

What the plaque says

Benjamin Beason's Crossing of the Colorado River Site of the camp, March 19,-26, 1836, of the Texas Army under General Sam Houston, who directed the retreat from Gonzales to the San Jacinto. Beason's (Beeson's) Crossing Benjamin Beason, one of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists, settled by a widely used Colorado River crossing near here in 1822. He and his wife Elizabeth proceeded to build a large home (also used as an inn) and establish a gristmill, sawmill, gin, and ferry operation at the crossing. His residence and business operations and a scattering of homesteads in the area formed a settlement known as Beason's Crossing. In the early spring of 1836 Beason found his home, family, and complex of commercial buildings in the perilous position in between Sam Houston's army, camped on the east bank of the Colorado River opposite Beason's Crossing, and a Mexican army led by General Juaquin Ramirez Y Sesma fast approaching from the west. Houston had chosen this site to camp because of its strategic location at the edge of the most populous part of Texas. With his 1500 troops in position, Houston is said to have declared, "on the Colorado I make my stand." Notwithstanding this bold declaration, Houston unexpectedly removed his Army to the Brazos River on March 26th. Beason's crossing was subsequently burned to the ground by a detachment of Houston's army scarcely hours before the arrival of Sesma's army. Sam Houston Bicentennial 1793 - 1993

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — 0.3 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 18 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 20 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• Stage Lines Through Columbus — 0.2 mi
• Asa Townsend — 0.2 mi
• Joseph V. Frnka — 0.2 mi
• Early Site of Dr. Logue's Drugstore — 0.2 mi