Gonzales-San Antonio Road

The surveyor who opened the road had met DeWitt in New Orleans and followed him to Texas, a widower with two children, his mother and his sister. Byrd Lockhart settled in the colony in March 1826, surveyed the lands around Gonzales, and in 1827 took charge of the town's row of blockhouses. In 1830 he was paid with four leagues on Plum Creek. In February 1836 he mustered the Gonzales Ranging Company, and he and Andrew Jackson Sowell left the Alamo for supplies shortly before it fell. The town of Lockhart is named for him.

What the plaque says

Gonzales-San Antonio Road Shortly after he established his colony along the Guadalupe River in 1825, Green Dewitt ordered that a road be built between his capital city, Gonzales, and San Antonio. Byrd Lockhart surveyed the road and opened it in 1827. Eighty miles long and running past three watering holes, settlers and Mexicans used it for travel and trade, though the presence of native groups in the area made traveling dangerous. Mile markers were carved into oak trunks along the route. During the Texas War for Independence, Stephen F. Austin, William B. Travis, and Jim Bowie used the road, as did the Immortal 32, who marched from Gonzales to the Alamo. Santa Anna also marched his army along it after the battle of the Alamo. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 31 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Gruene Historic District — 33 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.

More markers nearby

• Leesville School — 2.0 mi
• Sandies-Dewville Community — 3.5 mi
• Dewville United Methodist Church — 3.6 mi
• Rancho — 5.9 mi