San Felipe de Austin: Where Texas Was Born and Burned

The town that existed here for thirteen years changed the history of a continent, and then its own founders burned it to the ground.

In the spring of eighteen twenty-three, Stephen F. Austin planted his colony's capital on a bluff above the Brazos River at this spot. He named it San Felipe de Austin, in honor of both the Mexican crown's patron saint Philip and himself. Austin was twenty-nine years old and operating under a land grant from the newly independent Mexican government, which welcomed Anglo-American settlers to help populate its vast northern territory. What grew here in the decade that followed was the social, economic, and political nerve center of all the American colonies in Texas.

The conventions of eighteen thirty-two and eighteen thirty-three were held in San Felipe, where colonists pressed an increasingly frustrated set of demands on a Mexican government that kept changing its mind about how much autonomy they would be allowed. The Consultation of November eighteen thirty-five, which organized a provisional government for the colonies as war became inevitable, met here as well. By the time the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos in March eighteen thirty-six, San Felipe was already preparing for the worst.

The worst came fast. After the fall of the Alamo, Santa Anna's army swept eastward in a campaign designed to crush the revolution before a government could take root. Thousands of settlers fled in what historians call the Runaway Scrape, a mass eastward exodus across sodden spring prairies. The small garrison left at San Felipe faced a brutal choice.

On March twenty-ninth, eighteen thirty-six, under the command of Captain Moseley Baker, the garrison ordered the town evacuated. Then they set it on fire. Every building, every storehouse, every record of the colony's founding decade went up in smoke. Better that than let Santa Anna occupy the capital of the rebellion and use it as a base.

Santa Anna marched through the ashes. Three weeks later, his army was destroyed at San Jacinto, less than seventy miles to the southeast. The Republic of Texas was born. San Felipe was eventually rebuilt, but it never recovered its old importance. The capital moved. The railroads went elsewhere. The town that had been the birthplace of Texas colonization shrank into a quiet Austin County community, carrying a name that still encodes both the grandiosity of the original vision and the violence of its end.