Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

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A rendering of Cabeza de Vaca’s
shipwreck from a mural at the
Museum of the Gulf Coast.
PAINTING BY TRAVIS KEESE. COURTESY OF
THE MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST, PORT
ARTHUR, TEXAS.
establish homes and farms and ranches. They
cared only that the land was available, not
which nation claimed it. After Mexico
succeeded in shedding Spain’s collar in 1821,
the arrival of these individual Americans was
institutionalized in an empresarial system that
permitted, for the first time, legal immigration
into a Hispanized Texas. Stephen F. Austin
pioneered the system in the lower Colorado and
Brazos River Valley, but Haden Edwards secured
the first empresarial grant that headquartered in
Nacogdoches and extended to the lower Neches
valley, and when the Mexican government took
the land back in 1827, Joseph Vehlein and
Lorenzo de Zavala became empresarios.
Before the decade ended, Thomas Courts
received a land grant covering the southern
portion of lands destined to become Jefferson
County, including the site of the future city of
Port Arthur. Already a settlement on Tevis bluff
was on its way to becoming Beaumont; John
Grigsby had established Grigsby’s Bluff, the
beginnings of a community later known as Port
Neches; and settlements on Cow Bayou, later
known as Old Jefferson, had begun by 1835.
The Mexican Department of Nacogdoches and
the Municipality of Liberty were early seats of
government for settlers in the area, though both
were located some distance away.
ANGLO
DEVELOPMENT
By the mid-1830s, the Indians had mostly
perished or left the lower Neches area, Spain
and France no longer competed for control, and
the more recent American settlers were already
anxious for a change in allegiance. Eugene
Barker argued that an inevitable cultural clash
between Anglo settlers and the Hispanic
government produced the Texas Revolution; a
more popular belief is that despotism
represented by the government of Antonio
Lopez de Santa Anna forced Americans in Texas
to fight to preserve their “rights,” part of their
cultural baggage that they presumed had
crossed the Sabine River with them.
Protests over Mexico’s cloture of American
immigration by the Law of April 6, 1830, which
caused the very resistance to Mexican authority
it intended to prevent, produced military
8 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL