Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred: The Colony Trail

Before there was a Republic of Texas, before the Alamo, there was a young Missouri surveyor named Stephen Fuller Austin who took up his late father's contract to plant a colony of Anglo-American families on Mexican soil. In the summer of 1824, from a bluff above the Brazos River, land commissioner Baron de Bastrop began signing over titles to Austin's first colonists — the settlers history would come to call the Old Three Hundred. Their headright leagues lined the river from the Gulf coast to the San Antonio Road, and at the heart of it stood the little capital of San Felipe de Austin. This driving trail follows the spine of that colony down the Brazos, from Austin's own headquarters in San Felipe, through the Austin County seat country around Bellville, down to Richmond where a fierce widow named Jane Long kept a boarding house, and on to the twin river towns of Columbia and Brazoria near the coast — where the young republic held its first congress. It is roughly ninety miles of quiet farm-to-market road along the same water that carried the colony's cotton to the sea. Take your time; this is the ground where Texas began.