Site of Friar-Cardwell Stage Stand

Daniel Boone Friar was born on April 4, 1800, probably in Bertie County, North Carolina. He and his bride, Annie Graeme Friar, came to Texas in 1828 with Stephen F. Austin's second colony and settled at Washington-on-the-Brazos. In 1835 he was authorized to raise twenty-five rangers to patrol between the Brazos and Colorado rivers, and he captained a volunteer company at San Jacinto. The couple had nine children. He died in January 1858 at his home on Coleto Creek, near Yorktown, though a county veterans list gives 1857.

What the plaque says

Site of Friar-Cardwell Stage Stand In 1839 or 1840 at the junction of the La Grange - La Bahia and Victoria - Gonzales Roads (.5 miles east), Daniel Boone Friar (1800-58) built a home and store that served as a social, political, transportation, and trade center for early De Witt County. In 1841 the two-story frame structure became an overnight stop on stagecoach lines between San Antonio and coastal towns. It was designed as a temporary courthouse for the short-lived judicial county of De Witt in 1842. When the county was actually organized in 1846, the court met at Friar's place for several months. It was also the county's first post office, established on May 22, 1846, and named Cuero, with Friar as postmaster. In 1849 Friar sold the building to Crockett Cardwell (1812-91), who continued to operate it as a stage stand, store, post office, and community meeting place. The county's first Masonic lodge, Cameron Lodge No. 76, A. F. & A. M., was organized in an upstairs room in Nov. 1850 and met there until Jan. 1853. When the Gulf, Western Texas, and Pacific Railroad located the town of Cuero four miles south of the Cardwell stand in 1873, the post office was moved to that site. As the town along the railroad grew, other activities at the old stage stand ended. It was torn down in 1916. (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 2.8 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 22 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.
• De León Plaza — 28 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 28 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.

More markers nearby

• Old Chisholm Trail — steps away
• Site of Cameron, First County Seat of DeWitt County — 1.9 mi
• Charles Goodwin Breeden — 2.5 mi
• Judge Henry Clay Pleasants — 2.5 mi