Burnam's Ferry

This granite marker has traveled almost as far as the army it remembers. Set for the 1936 Centennial where local historian Houston Wade had placed Houston's crossing, it was later challenged by two avocational historians who put the crossing several miles south, at the far end of Burnam's league. The stone went to Colorado County, its words were ground off, and new text put the ferry near Weimar. Fayette County got it back, had it refinished and recut with the original words, and it now stands two-sided, its front marked "Returned to Fayette County 2010."

What the plaque says

Burnam's Ferry First ferry in present-day Fayette County. Established about 1824 at the crossing of the La Bahia Road by Jesse Burnam. After the Army of the Republic of Texas crossed on March 19, 1836, the ferry was destroyed by order of General Sam Houston to prevent its use by the advancing Mexican Army.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 3.8 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.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 5.5 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.
• Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery State Historic Sites — 7.6 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.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 9.8 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.

More markers nearby

• James J. Ross — 5.4 mi
• Dubina — 5.4 mi
• Old Osage — 6.5 mi
• Saint Michael's Catholic Church — 6.7 mi