Site of the Home of Captain John York

York's frontier life began east of here. He brought his wife, Letitia Crain, and the children to Texas about 1822 and settled near San Felipe, received a league and a labor in Austin's colony, and served as sheriff of Austin County in 1837. He resettled on Coleto Creek in 1846 and was elected a commissioner of the new county. In October 1848 he led volunteers against what the plaque calls Indians, a Lipan Apache raiding party by one account. His son-in-law James Madison Bell died in the same fight, and the two men share one grave east of Yorktown.

What the plaque says

Site of the Home of Captain John York A member of one of Austin's ranging companies at San Felipe in 1829. Commanded A Company at the capture of San Antonio in 1835. Yorktown, named in his honor was laid out in 1848 on his land. Born July 4, 1800. Killed by Indians, October 11, 1848.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 12 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.
• Goliad State Park and Historic Site — 20 mi
  Mission Espíritu Santo on the San Antonio River, a mission ranch whose herds seeded Texas cattle country, rebuilt from ruin by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 20 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.
• Presidio La Bahía — 20 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Home of Robert Justus Kleberg — 2.4 mi
• Peter Bluntzer — 3.6 mi
• Meyersville — 4.4 mi
• Weser — 5.2 mi