Columbus Oak

The two plaques give Williamson his nickname and his oak; the rest of his life ran well beyond Columbus. An illness at fifteen drew his right leg back at the knee. At San Felipe in 1829 he co-founded the Cotton Plant newspaper and urged resistance to Mexican rule. Commissioned a major to organize rangers in November 1835, he fought at San Jacinto. He married Mary Jane Edwards in April 1837, the month of this court, later named a son Annexus for the cause he pressed, and died at Wharton in 1859.

What the plaque says

Columbus Oak Beneath this tree the first Court of the Third Judicial District of The Republic of Texas was held April, 1837 by Judge Robert M. Williamson ("Three Legged Willie"). District Court Tree In 1837 this oak sheltered Texas jurors. Courthouse was unfinished because logs coming down-river for building had swept past in strong current. R.M. Williamson, presiding, was called "Three-Legged Willie" due to appearance: He had good leg, crippled leg, and wooden leg. (1969)

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

• 1890 Cornerstone Ceremony — steps away
• William Menefee — steps away
• Early Site of Dr. Logue's Drugstore — steps away
• Tumlinson Family — steps away