San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site

Stephen F. Austin chose a high bluff over the Brazos near John McFarland's ferry in 1823, after first considering the lower Colorado. The governor of the Eastern Interior Provinces, Felipe de la Garza, proposed the name, for the empresario and for his own patron saint. Surveyor Seth Ingram laid out a Mexican grid of avenues and four plazas, and the town sprawled along the Atascosito Road instead. In 1828 it had about 200 people, ten of them Hispanic, and men outnumbered women ten to one.

San Felipe was where the colony did its business. The land office was here; seven mail routes met here from 1826; the Texas Gazette began on September 25, 1829, and Gail Borden's Telegraph and Texas Register on October 10, 1835. The Conventions of 1832 and 1833 met here, and the Consultation of November 1835 made it the seat of the provisional government until the March 1836 convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. The cotton plantations in the bottoms around it were worked by enslaved people, whose stories the site has made the subject of a summer exhibit.

On March 30, 1836, Moseley Baker's garrison ordered the town evacuated and burned it to keep it from Santa Anna. It never recovered; Bellville took the county seat in 1846. The museum holds a field desk of Austin's, an 1830s printing press and artifacts from excavations of the townsite.