William A. Matthews

Before the war on his stone, William A. Matthews recruited settlers for Green DeWitt. In December 1830 at Bolivar, Tennessee, he drew up an indenture for a Tennessee-Texas Land Company, with Caleb Brock, Caleb P. Alexander and the McKean brothers paying to move twenty families to the colony by April 1831. The backers were to take two-thirds of the land saved for the settlers and Matthews one-third. Seventeen families signed, and he led them overland to Gonzales, then handled their supplies and Spanish land titles. John C. McKean later testified that only he and Matthews kept their side.

What the plaque says

William A. Matthews Star and Wreath A volunteer soldier, freighter, quartermaster and courier in the Texas War for Independence. Erected by the State of Texas, 1962

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 0.9 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Palmetto State Park — 9.8 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 18 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 26 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Eli Mitchell — steps away
• Amasa Turner — steps away
• Charles Mason — steps away
• Dr. John Turner Tinsley — steps away