Site of First Zavala County Courthouse

After the county seat moved, Batesville shrank. Crystal City failed to win the seat in 1926, then won the 1928 election by 978 votes to 446, and the brick courthouse here lost its purpose. Batesville had about 500 people in the early 1890s and about 200 by the early 1930s. The Comanche Irrigation District's charter expired in 1959 after years of drought and neglected maintenance. From 1963 to the early 1970s the town lost over a third of its people and nearly half its businesses. It stayed a trading center for the county's northeast.

What the plaque says

Site of First Zavala County Courthouse Zavala County was created in 1858 from Maverick and Uvalde counties. Named for Lorenzo de Zavala, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, the county was not organized for judicial purposes until 1884. In that year citizens elected county officials and selected Batesville as the county seat. Batesville originally was known as the Bates Ditch community or Bates City. Elijah A. and Ellen J. Bates are credited with its founding. They came to the area in the late 1860s and became a prominent ranching family. Bates, who is credited with the first irrigation project in the area, began selling two-acre plots of the irrigated farmland, and a settlement grew up near his home. After the selection of Batesville as the Zavala County Seat, Bates conveyed a portion of his land for use as a courthouse square. The first county courthouse and jail were constructed at this site in 1885. Built of burnt bricks made from Leona River soil, the two story courthouse featured offices downstairs and a courtroom upstairs. The structure was used as the county courthouse until 1928, when the seat of government was moved to Crystal City. The old courthouse then was used for a variety of purposes until it was torn down in 1947. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Inge Historical Site — 18 mi
  A county park on the Leona River below a 140-foot volcanic plug, where an army post guarded the new road to El Paso from 1849 to 1869 and Texas Rangers camped after.
• Uvalde Grand Opera House — 20 mi
  An 1891 Victorian opera house on the Uvalde square with a turret and a dragon weathervane, once owned by John Nance Garner and still staging volunteer theater upstairs.
• Briscoe-Garner Museum — 20 mi
  The Uvalde house of John Nance Garner, the vice president who made the office a power in Congress, now a free museum to him and to Governor Dolph Briscoe.
• Crystal City Family Internment Camp Site — 22 mi
  The only wartime camp built for whole families, where Japanese, German and Italian Americans and Latin American deportees were held from 1942 to 1948, now marked by cottage foundations and a pool.

More markers nearby

• The Ditch — 14 mi
• The Bosque-Larios Expedition — 16 mi
• Site of Fort Inge — 17 mi
• Site of Fort Inge — 17 mi