Site of Round Top House

Plácido Benavides, who built the Round Top House, rose from secretary to militia captain. He arrived in 1828 as secretary to Fernando De León, married Agustina De León in 1831, and was twice elected alcalde, in 1832 and 1834. In early 1836 he warned James Fannin of a plot against Texans, and later that year he had to hand over Isaac Hamilton, a Goliad survivor he had been sheltering, to Urrea's lancers. Suspected of sympathy for Mexico after San Jacinto, he fled to Louisiana with the De León family and died at Opelousas in 1837.

What the plaque says

Site of Round Top House The Citadel of Victoria. Built before the year 1836 by Placido Benavides, son-in-law of Martin De Leon. The house served as a place of refuge for the citizens of Victoria during the Comanche raid of 1840.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — steps away
  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 — 1.9 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.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 16 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 25 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Site of Victoria's First Church — steps away
• This Marker Faces the Site_Home of John Joseph Linn — steps away
• In Memory of Edward Conrad — steps away
• Home of Empresario Martin De Leon — steps away