Michael Robert Pilley

The stone gives Pilley one line on the Mier Expedition, and the surviving muster rolls show where he stood in it. He served in the company of William M. Ryon, a Fort Bend County surveyor who drew a white bean and lived. The rolls spell him Pilley, Pelley and Pilly, and Fisher's command list records him at Perote Castle. His company fared badly. Thomas L. Jones, William Rowan and Edward Esty were shot at Salado on March 25, 1843, and others died at Saltillo, in a Mexico prison and in the Perote hospital. Ryon came home in 1845.

What the plaque says

Michael Robert Pilley A member of the Mier Expedition, 1842. Born in Grantham, England March 30, 1820, died January 4, 1865. (1936)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site — 13 mi
  Stephen F. Austin's colonial capital on a Brazos bluff, the town of the Consultation and the first Texas newspapers, burned by its own garrison in the Runaway Scrape of 1836.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 20 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• Stafford Opera House — 24 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Round Top and Festival Hill — 28 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.

More markers nearby

• Joachim H. Hintz — steps away
• Bellville High School — 0.4 mi
• First National Bank of Bellville — 0.5 mi
• Bellville — 0.6 mi