The Alum Creek Fort

Where Alum Creek runs into the Colorado, families from Lincoln County, Missouri put up a log fort in the late 1820s and built their cabins around it. They had come in under Stephen F. Austin's second colony contract, and the families named on the state marker are the Winslow Turners, the Stephen Cottles and the Ahijah Highsmiths. Highsmith registered in the colony in April 1827, declaring himself thirty four years old with six children, and was issued title to his league on 5 April 1831. Settlements spread out from the stockade, among them one called Cottletown and another called Yeupon. There was a private school by 1835, and in 1846 James Craft deeded five acres for a campground and meeting house. In 1856 the Steussy brothers advertised a steam mill pinery on the creek, six miles below Bastrop. The community peaked around 1884 at two hundred people with three mills, two general stores, a blacksmith shop and a saloon, then fell to forty by 1896. The post office closed in 1898 and the school held on until 1937. Highsmith's son Benjamin Franklin Highsmith is the reason the place is argued over. The Texas State Historical Association records that Travis sent him out of the Alamo on 18 February 1836 with an appeal to Fannin at Goliad, and that Mexican cavalry chased him six miles on the way back. He fought at San Jacinto and was granted land for it. But his name is on no surviving Alamo document, not on Neill's muster roll and not on the Bexar voting list of 1 February, and in an 1881 land claim he swore he had been discharged at the end of 1835. He first told the courier story in an affidavit of 1895, when everyone who might have contradicted him was dead. The state marker that stood in the roadside park was reported missing in 2010.