James Wales Jones

Jones was born in Columbia County, Georgia, on January 13, 1797, and he and his brother Randal were among the first of Austin's colonists, here by January 1822. On August 10, 1824, he received title to a league and a labor in present Fort Bend and Wharton counties and settled in Fort Bend County. Ammon Underwood visited his plantation in January 1835. He served in the Texas army under Capt. Wyly Martin from March 7 to June 7, 1836, and in 1840 sat on a committee to check fraudulent land claims. He died at Prairie Lea in 1847.

What the plaque says

James Wales Jones Born in Georgia 1797 One of the Old Three Hundred Colonists A Soldier in the Texas War for Independence Died 1847 His wife Hetty Stiles Jones Died 1899 Erected by the State of Texas 1957

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Cemetery — steps away
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.3 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 0.4 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Capitol — 1.0 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.

More markers nearby

• Capt. John R. Hughes — steps away
• Thomas Pliney Plaster — steps away
• Dr. Gideon Lincecum — steps away
• Robert Potter — steps away