Ponton Family

Ponton Creek is the family's lasting record. It rises about three and a half miles southwest of Moulton and runs sixteen and a half miles southeast to Rocky Creek, east of Shiner, over sandy clay loam that erodes badly; its banks have eroded fifteen to twenty feet. The Handbook says William Ponton settled on it in 1832 and that Comanches (Numunuu) killed and scalped him in May 1834. The plaque has the family arriving in 1829. Today the land along the creek is mostly rangeland, pasture, corn and grain sorghum.

What the plaque says

Ponton Family Virginians William (1772-1834) and Isabella (Moreland) Ponton came to Texas in 1829 from Missouri. With them were their children Andrew, Sarah Ann, and Mary Jane and son-in-law James Patrick. Their son Joel Ponton arrived in 1834. The families received land in DeWitt's colony. William Ponton was the first recorded settler killed by Comanche Indians in the area that became Lavaca County. Joel Ponton and a companion were attacked in the same area in 1840; Joel survived with two arrows in his back. Ponton Creek was named for William. The Pontons and their neighbors stood up against the Mexican Army in the Battle of Gonzales and later fled the area in "The Runaway Scrape" in the wake of Santa Anna's victory at the Alamo. After the Texan victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, they returned to rebuild their homes from almost nothing. They endured Indian attacks and lived through the eras of the Republic of Texas, statehood, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Exemplary pioneers, they were mothers and fathers, alcaldes, judges, tax collectors, commissioners, doctors, preachers, storekeepers, farmers, ranchers, and official peacemakers. The children and grandchildren of William and Isabella Ponton forged Lavaca County from a wilderness. The story of the Ponton family is a story of Texas. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 4.2 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 13 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 18 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.

More markers nearby

• Site of Evergreen School — 0.8 mi
• Kaspar Wire Works — 4.0 mi
• Captain Charles Welhausen — 4.4 mi
• Shiner — 4.5 mi