Chambers Creek

Chambers Creek is named for Thomas Jefferson Chambers, a Virginia-born lawyer, surveyor and land speculator who in 1834 received the first land grant issued by the Mexican government in what is now Ellis County. The creek rises at the junction of its north and south forks southwest of Boz in west central Ellis County and runs sixty-seven miles, first southeast, then northeast and then south, to its mouth on Richland Creek in southern Navarro County. Interstate 45 crosses it north of Corsicana. Chambers had learned Spanish living with a family in Mexico City, became surveyor general of Texas in 1829, and on 23 September 1834 was paid for his surveying with eleven leagues of land, which he located in Ellis, Navarro, Chambers, Liberty and Hays counties.

In 1834 he received a Mexican licence to practise law, the only foreigner to hold one, and he was named chief justice of a new Texas supreme court in 1834 without ever presiding over a court, and was hanged in effigy at Brazoria for siding with the authorities during the Anahuac disturbances. In 1854 he chartered the Chambers Terraqueous Transportation Company, which was to build 4,000 miles of road with a right of way 200 feet wide over land, rivers, lakes and bays for an amphibious vehicle; the machine was never put into operation. He lost races for governor in 1851, 1853, 1861 and 1863. On the night of 15 March 1865 an assassin fired a shotgun through an open window of his house at Anahuac and killed him. Chambers County is also named for him, and in 1925 the legislature paid his descendants $20,000 for his disputed claim to the site of the Capitol in Austin.