Santiago Del Valle Grant

Santiago del Valle was a hacendado of the Monclova area of Coahuila. He presided over the constituent congress of Coahuila and Texas in 1825, served as counselor to the governor, and arbitrated a feud between the Sánchez Navarro and Elizondo families. Through the Banco de Comercio y Agricultura and the Galveston City Company he was linked to Thomas F. McKinney and Samuel May Williams. The tenth league of his grant, which did not go to Menard, he sold to Bartlett Sims. A Catholic and a Federalist, he appears always to have lived in Coahuila.

What the plaque says

Santiago Del Valle Grant McKinney Falls State Park lies in the center of an early Texas land grant that originally fell within the empresario contract of Texian hero Ben Milam. Ten leagues of land were transferred in 1832 to Santiago del Valle, who at that time was secretary of the Mexican government of Coahuila y Texas and had previously served as a member of the Mexican Congress. In 1835 Del Valle sold nine leagues of his land to Michel Menard, who in 1838 helped found the town of Galveston. Thomas F. McKinney, one of the Menard's business associates, purchased the Del Valle grant in 1839. His family probably was the first of the property owners to live on the land, which they began to occupy during the late 1840s. McKinney had sold all but approximately 2,800 acres of the land by the time of his death in 1873. The lands within the Santiago del Valle grant remained primarily agricultural during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Communities such as Bluff Springs, Pilot Knob, Creedmoor, and Del Valle began to develop during this period. While the northern part of the Del Valle grant has become increasingly urbanized, the southern portion remains largely rural, and is preserved in this state park. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McKinney Falls State Park — 0.2 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Texas State Cemetery — 5.8 mi
  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 — 5.8 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 — 6.0 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.

More markers nearby

• Doyle Farm — 3.0 mi
• Texas Dental Association — 3.9 mi
• Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition — 3.9 mi
• Del Valle Army Air Base (Bergstrom Air Force Base) — 4.2 mi