Dona Patricia De La Garza De Leon

Patricia de la Garza De León brought the household and the money. Born at Soto la Marina in 1775, she married Martín in 1795, and her $9,800 inheritance went into the colony. In Victoria she lived in a hand-hewn log house with a dirt floor, yet filled it with fine furniture and kept servants. She helped start a school and the church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, and sent children and grandchildren to Europe and Mexico to study. Shortly before her death in 1849 she gave the homestead to the Catholic Church, with altar vessels including a gold monstrance.

What the plaque says

Dona Patricia De La Garza De Leon Pioneer Colony Co-founder and Texas Patriot (1775-1849) Came from Tamaulipas to Texas (then northernmost province of Mexico) about 1800, to be at the side of her husband, Don Martin de Leon, as he sought to obtain a Spanish grant to establish a civilized colony here. With her family of ten children, she was a patriot, loyal to the cause of Texas. Her home was a center of pioneer culture. Homesite was later given to St. Mary's Church. Recorded - 1972

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 0.8 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 1.6 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Silvestre De Leon — steps away
• Don Martin De Leon — steps away
• Fernando De Leon — steps away
• Darwin M. Stapp — steps away