Brookfield-Evans-Cremer House

Before he came to this league, Musgrove Evans had already started a town. A Quaker surveyor drawn west by hopes of Michigan territorial road contracts, he platted Tecumseh on the River Raisin in 1824, the first settlement in Lenawee County, and proposed its name for the Shawnee leader. He was its first postmaster and probate judge and helped organize Michigan's first temperance society. His 1826 frame house there, long an inn, is on the National Register. After his wife Abigail died, he brought his five children to Texas in 1834. The house here is a private home.

What the plaque says

Brookfield-Evans-Cremer House Samuel bought the 1832 David Berry league, where this house stands, in 1835. Samuel died at the Alamo the following year. Musgrove Evans and Brookfield's son Francis served in the Texas Army at the Battle of San Jacinto. In 1838 The Republic of Texas Congress voted to buy this land and the adjoining Eblin league as a location for the new capital, to be named "Austin," but President Sam Houston vetoed the bill. Musgrove Evans later served as Auditor General of the Republic. Brookfield erected a two-story stone residence at this site. When Mexican troops seized San Antonio in 1842, Samuel Maverick's family fled the city and took refuge here. David Berry, the original landowner, and Francis Brookfield joined other local men to fight the Mexican invasion force. They were both killed in the Dawson Massacre, Sept. 18, 1842. William Brookfield's daughter Emma (1814-1877), later occupant of the house, married Evans' son Vincent. After he died, she married Julius Cremer (d. 1889). The J. C. Brown family, owners since 1893, rebuilt the structure after a fire in 1911 destroyed the second floor. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 4.4 mi
  A shared tomb on the Colorado River bluff for the men of the Dawson fight and the black bean lottery, beside the ruins of a German stonemason's spring-fed brewery.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 5.8 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.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 8.9 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 9.8 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.

More markers nearby

• Czech Catholic Union of Texas — 0.4 mi
• Cedar Cemetery — 1.0 mi
• The Oldest Czech Settlement — 1.1 mi
• Philadelphia Evangelical Lutheran Church — 3.6 mi