Site of Town of Old Velasco

Old Velasco was a shipping town before it was a resort, and its numbers show how quickly it fell. Samuel May Williams and Thomas F. McKinney kept warehouses at the port, and riverboats ran from its wharves to Galveston and New Orleans. Cholera cut the population to about 100 in 1834. A female academy and a men's school were operating by 1838, and a post office served the town from 1846 to 1891. The canal to Galveston Bay, finished in 1856, drew shipping away. By 1884 only fifty people were left, and a new town was surveyed in 1891.

What the plaque says

Site of Town of Old Velasco One of oldest Texas towns. Port of entry for over 25,000 settlers, 1821-1835. Scene of first armed conflict leading to Texas Revolution, 1832. In mid-1800s, resort place for wealthy plantation families. Declined after the Civil War and 1875 hurricane. This school is named for Velasco. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 7.5 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 17 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 22 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Galveston Island State Park — 29 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.

More markers nearby

• Velasco Methodist Church — steps away
• Colonel Robert M. Coleman — 0.5 mi
• Four Miles Southeast to the Original Town of Velasco — 0.6 mi
• R. O'Hara Lanier School — 0.7 mi