Casa Navarro State Historic Site

José Antonio Navarro was born in San Antonio on February 27, 1795, the son of a Corsican-born merchant, and he became one of only two native-born Texans to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. He served in the legislatures of Coahuila and Texas, the Republic and the state, and helped write the constitutions of 1836 and 1845; at the 1845 convention he was the only Tejano delegate. In the Republic's congress he worked for the rights of Tejanos, whom many Anglo Texans treated with contempt after the Revolution.

He paid for his loyalty. Sent as a commissioner on the 1841 Santa Fe expedition, he was captured with the rest, sentenced to death for treason, then held in the prison of San Juan de Ulúa at Veracruz until he escaped in 1845. Back home, he opposed the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party in the 1850s. The state site also tells what Navarro's records show: he owned six to nine enslaved people between 1856 and 1864, among them Henry Navarro, who after emancipation bought land of his own in Atascosa County.

Navarro bought this lot at Laredo and Nueva streets in 1832 and moved in once the house and a two-story store were finished in the mid-1850s. The three buildings are adobe and caliche block, the oldest an adobe kitchen of about 1832, and they are the last remnant of Laredito, the Mexican neighborhood on San Antonio's west side. Laredo Street follows a line of the old Camino Real. Navarro died here on January 13, 1871.