Tonkawa Bank

The name comes from people who lived on this bluff when Martin De Leon founded Victoria in 1824. John Linn recalled a Tonkawa field above the town and a masonry church whose foundation was still visible. The church was Spanish. For decades historians called this a visita of Mission Espiritu Santo. Digs in 1996 to 1998 reinterpreted it as the mission's second location, occupied by April 1726, with the footings of a two-room stone church. Jarratt reported its walls three feet high as late as 1922, and the ruins were later dynamited.

What the plaque says

Tonkawa Bank Reports of a French settlement somewhere in Texas sent a shockwave through New Spain. Eleven expeditions by land and sea were launched to find La Salle's settlement and destroy it. On April 22, 1689, Spanish governor General Alonso de Leon and his troops discovered the deserted outpost. Considering their orders fulfilled, they buried La Salle's eight cannons and returned to Mexico City. One year later, De Leon returned, burned the French structures, and proceeded on to East Texas to found the first missions there. In 1722, the original Presidio La Bahia was built atop the remains of the French outpost. The original Mission Espiritu Santo, was established across Garcitas Creek in present-day Jackson County. The same problems which doomed La Salle's colony also plagued the Spaniards, necessitating a move. Missionaries led by Father Ignacio de San Jose y Baena were operating at a new site, twenty-five miles away on the east bank of the Guadalupe River by 1725. Tonkawa Bank, as it would later be known, had a reliable supply of fresh water (Spring Creek), as well as stone and timber which were used to construct the Spanish complex. A sizable earthen dam was constructed to aid the irrigation of crops below the mission site. Quickly outgrowing the site, Spanish agricultural and missionary activities relocated once again, eight miles upstream, to the area now known as Mission Valley. From 1726 to 1749, the mission occupied the west bank of the river, supported by the presidio two miles downstream on the opposite bank. By November 1749, the mission and presidio relocated to the San Antonio River near present-day Goliad. The migration of Presidio La Bahia and Mission Espiritu Santo from Garcitas Creek (1722) to the San Antonio River (1749) is a vital chapter in the Spanish colonial history of Texas. (1970, 2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 1.7 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 — 2.0 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.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• William Robert Smith — 0.8 mi
• Abel Seymour Cunningham — 0.9 mi
• John Howland Wood — 0.9 mi
• Victor Marion Rose — 0.9 mi