Sebastian

Sebastian's hardest day was August 6, 1915, when raiders led by Luis de la Rosa killed A. L. Austin and his son Charles. Austin headed the local Law and Order League, which federal investigators said had driven off several bad men. It was part of the Plan of San Diego uprising. Reprisals fell on Mexican Americans, most of them never named in surviving records. An unidentified Hispanic man was shot at Sebastian on August 10, and within days Rangers and vigilantes killed other Mexicans. Estimates of Mexican Americans killed in Texas in the 1910s run from 300 to 5,000.

What the plaque says

Sebastian Originally part of the San Juan de Carricitos land grant, this townsite later was part of South Texas' famed King Ranch. Sebastian was known as Stillman Town Tract until 1906, when it was renamed to honor an officer of the Rock Island Railroad. In 1914, the Sebastian Realty Company was promoting the town in the hope that it would become a major agricultural center. During the early 20th-century period of lawlessness in South Texas, Sebastian experienced a bandit raid in which two members of the Austin family were killed. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of South Texas History — 23 mi
  Edinburg's regional museum, begun in 1967 in the 1910 Hidalgo County jail and now telling the Rio Grande's story from fossils and native peoples through steamboats to the 20th century.
• Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge — 28 mi
  About 2,000 acres of river forest on the Rio Grande's north bank, the surviving part of Benigno Leal's 1834 land grant, kept as a refuge since 1943 where two bird migration routes meet.
• Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge — 29 mi
  A coastal refuge set up in 1946 for wintering redhead ducks, with 417 bird species recorded and, by the Fish and Wildlife Service's account, the largest ocelot population in the United States.
• Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park — 30 mi
  A flat coastal prairie north of Brownsville where Taylor's army and Arista's Army of the North fought the first major battle of the Mexican War on May 8, 1846, now interpreted from both sides.

More markers nearby

• Lyford — 4.7 mi
• Hilltop Gardens — 6.7 mi
• James Henry Dishman — 7.2 mi
• Edward Burleson Raymond — 9.4 mi