City of Columbus

The plaque ends in 1837 with a platted town; the town's legal life came later and proved fragile. Columbus incorporated on August 22, 1866, after the Civil War. The council abolished the city marshal's office in 1903, and after a run of killings and a vote against restoring it, residents chose in 1906 to disincorporate. County commissioners governed the town until 1927, when it reincorporated at about 3,100 people. In November 1935 a mob lynched two young Black men, Bennie Mitchell, Jr., and Ernest Collins, after they were brought back to Columbus for a court hearing.

What the plaque says

City of Columbus Oldest surveyed and platted Anglo-American town in Texas. About Christmas, 1821, Robert and Joseph Kuykendall and Daniel Gilleland settled at this place--in vicinity of old Indian campgrounds on Mexico-to-Sabine River Trail. Stephen F. Austin had noted advantages of this spot earlier. In 1823 he and the Baron de Bastrop surveyed land here. Although they relocated the capital, this site remained a hamlet with a grist mill, ferry, other improvements. Soon known as Beason's, community had as settlers, along with the first three men, many others of the "Old 300": Abram, John, Rawson, Thomas V., and William Alley; Benjamin Beason, Caleb R. Botick, David Bright, Robert Brotherton, James Cummins, W. B. DeWees, Thomas Kuykendall, James McNair, James Nelson, Gabriel Strawn Snyder; Elizabeth, James, and John Tumlinson; Nathaniel Whiting, and possibly others. In 1824, Milton Cook opened a tavern where many Texans stopped over the years. By 1835, village had been named. In Texas War for Independence, buildings here were burned by the Texas Army, to keep them out of the hands of Santa Anna. But after the victory at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, Columbus rose again. W. B. DeWees and J. W. E. Wallace platted the new townsite in 1837. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — steps away
  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

• Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the American Declaration of Independence — steps away
• Site of Railway Hospital — steps away
• The Colorado County Citizen — steps away
• Dilue Rose Harris — steps away