Austin's Colony Capital

For twelve years this bend of the Brazos was the effective capital of Anglo Texas. Stephen F. Austin founded the settlement in 1823 to administer the colony he had contracted with the Mexican government to bring in, beginning with the 297 families later remembered as the Old Three Hundred. From 1824 to 1836 San Felipe de Austin was the political, commercial and social centre of the American colonies in Texas. The colony's newspaper was printed here, its land titles were issued here, and the provisional government met here through the tense winter before independence, in a town of log and plank buildings that at its height held only a few hundred residents. Nothing about the place looked like a capital city, and everyone who lived and argued in it knew that perfectly well. It ended abruptly. On March 29, 1836, with Santa Anna's army advancing and the local militia defending the river crossing, Sam Houston ordered the residents to burn their own town rather than leave it standing for the enemy. They did. San Felipe never recovered its position, and the capital went first to Washington on the Brazos and afterwards to Houston. The state historic site sits about two miles north of the interstate near Sealy and was substantially rebuilt and expanded in 2018. Its museum holds Austin's own field desk, an 1830s printing press of the type that produced the colony's newspaper, and a great deal of material recovered by archaeologists working across the buried townsite.