Dolores Townsite

Beales was an English doctor, born in Norfolk in 1804, who went to Mexico in 1826 as surgeon to a British mining company in Michoacan. In 1830 he married Maria Dolores Soto y Saldana, widow of the land speculator Richard Exter, and managed the empresario interests she had inherited before seeking his own. In eight months of 1832 he and three sets of partners won contracts for about 55 million acres north of the Rio Grande. By 1835 he was practicing medicine in New York City, and he kept at it into the 1870s.

What the plaque says

Dolores Townsite Only settlement founded in John Charles Beales' ill-fated Rio Grande colony of 1834-1836. Beales (1804-1878) -- empresario of 70,000,000 acres in present Southern and Western Texas and New Mexico -- was Texas' largest known land king. In 1833 he and a partner brought 59 settlers here to colonize a town to be named for Beales' Mexican wife. Indian raids and drouth soon took their toll, but the death blow came in 1836. As the group fled the Mexican Army during the Texas Revolution, Comanches killed all but 7 of one party. This ended the town's existence. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Clark and the Old Guardhouse Museum — 7.3 mi
  The 1852 post at Las Moras Springs, home from 1872 to 1914 of the Black Seminole scouts, now a gated resort with its old guardhouse open as a museum on weekends.
• Kickapoo Cavern State Park — 20 mi
  A lightly developed former ranch on the Kinney-Edwards line with twenty caves, a Saturday tour into a 1,400-foot cavern and a summer bat flight from Stuart Bat Cave.
• San Felipe Creek — 21 mi
  The spring-fed creek that made Del Rio, rising from the third largest springs in Texas and running past swimming holes and a hike-and-bike trail through town.
• Val Verde Winery — 22 mi
  The family winery an Italian immigrant founded on Del Rio's irrigated land in 1883, which outlasted Prohibition by selling table grapes and kept Texas wine alive into the 1970s.

More markers nearby

• Carver School Grounds — 7.0 mi
• 2nd Cavalry Division at Fort Clark — 7.2 mi
• Fort Clark, U.S.A. — 7.3 mi
• Fort Clark — 7.3 mi