Old Stone Fort: Four Revolutions in One Building

The building now replicated on the Stephen F. Austin State University campus in Nacogdoches started as a trading post. Antonio Gil Y'Barbo built a stone house on the Camino Real in seventeen seventy-nine, using it to run a trade business at the crossroads of Spanish East Texas.

Over the following decades that same building witnessed four separate revolutionary movements. It served as headquarters for the Gutierrez-Magee expedition in eighteen twelve, the first armed push for Texas independence from Spain. The Gutierrez-Magee fighters planned their first Texas newspaper there, the Gaceta de Tejas.

The structure later hosted the long succession of filibuster expeditions, republic schemes, and independence plots that swirled through East Texas before the Texas Revolution settled the question. The original building was demolished in nineteen oh two, but in nineteen thirty-six a replica was built on the Stephen F. Austin campus for the Texas Centennial.