Guadalupe River

The river was supposed to be a highway. Mexico approved navigation projects in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Republic of Texas authorized lower-river work in the 1840s, and the legislature did the same in the 1850s, yet large snags above Victoria kept upriver travel closed. Boats ran from Victoria to Gulf ports until the railroad reached Port Lavaca in 1861. Floods were the other half of the story, bad enough that the state created the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority in 1933. A 35-mile barge canal to Victoria opened to commercial traffic in the mid-1960s.

What the plaque says

Guadalupe River Discovered in this vicinity on April 14, 1689 by Alonso de Leon. Named in honor of "Our Lady of Guadalupe" patron saint of Mexico. Here at a ford, used since Indian days, empresario Martin de Leon founded the town of Victoria in 1824. 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 0.6 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 — 2.3 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 — 15 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 — 24 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

• Home of Empresario Martin De Leon — 0.4 mi
• In Memory of Edward Conrad — 0.4 mi
• Site of Victoria's First Church — 0.4 mi
• This Marker Faces the Site_Home of John Joseph Linn — 0.4 mi