The Gotier Trace

James W. Gotier, whose name was also written Goacher, Goucher and Gotcher, was born in Pendleton, South Carolina, and came to Texas in the 1820s, settling on Rabbs Creek in what became southern Lee County. In 1831 or 1832, under the authority of the ayuntamiento of San Felipe, he built the trail. The road probably curved to use an easier crossing of Cummins Creek. In 1835 he moved his family to Bastrop County to plant cotton and raise cattle, and he is said to have built the county's first house.

What the plaque says

The Gotier Trace Originated in 1820s. Crossed the present counties of Austin, Washington, Fayette, Lee, Bastrop; joined San Felipe, capital of Stephen F. Austin's colony, with Bastrop. Marked by James Gotier, a settler who (with several in his family) died in an Indian massacre near this trace in 1837. Like most early Texas roads, this was only a marked route which travelers could follow-- dusty in droughts, boggy in rains. From such traces, wagon roads and cattle trails, Texas has developed over 67,000 miles of fine paved highways-- a system recognized as nation's finest. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 0.4 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 18 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 26 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 28 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Lost Pines of Texas — steps away
• Early History of the City of Bastrop — steps away
• Bastrop County — steps away
• Felipe Enrique Neri Baron de Bastrop — 0.6 mi