Home of Empresario Martin De Leon

The first settlers reached this site in October 1824: Martin De Leon's family and twelve others. The remaining twenty-nine of the forty-one families came the next year. A 1986 survey counts thirty-three of them as native Mexican families and eight as Anglo-American. The Mexican settlers built jacales, and later arrivals added log, adobe, brick and stone houses. In 1839 Edward Linn resurveyed the town, and officials warned that anything standing in a planned street would be moved. A two-story adobe courthouse lasted until about 1910.

What the plaque says

Home of Empresario Martin De Leon Born at Burgos, Mexico, 1765. Appointed Captain in the Spanish Army, 1790, for bravery displayed in Indian fighting. Received a grant in 1824 to settle 41 families in Texas. Established the town of Victoria. Received an additional grant in 1829 to settle 150 families. Died in Victoria, 1833. His colony was the only one in which Mexican customs and traditions prevailed. 1936

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 0.2 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 — 2.0 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

• In Memory of Edward Conrad — steps away
• This Marker Faces the Site_Home of John Joseph Linn — steps away
• Site of Victoria's First Church — steps away
• Site of Round Top House — steps away