Best Laid Plat:
San Felipe de Austin in Vision and Reality, 1823-1836
Introduction
In the fall of 1823, Stephen F. Austin , surveyor Seth Ingram , and the Baron de Bastrop met at a remote spot on the Brazos River to begin work on a momentous experiment: the creation of a new town for the scores of Anglo-American immigrants that Mexican officials hoped would soon make the area home. With its Imperial Colonization Law of the same year, the newly independent Mexican Empire had inaugurated a new era, betting on a bold solution to the problems that had long plagued its unstable northeastern frontier. It would invite foreign families to settle in the old Spanish province of Texas, where they would hopefully help defend the region from Comanche raids, develop a more robust local economy, and deter westward expansion by the United States.
“Stephen F. Austin,” n.d., in Katie Daffan’s Texas Heroes: A Reader for Schools . Boston: Benj. H. Sanborn & Company, 1912, 58. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
To entice potential settlers, Mexico offered cheap land, tax holidays, and immediate Mexican citizenship, which colonists could use to form local governments under the Mexican model. Though officials hoped the newcomers’ frontier skills and knowledge of the cotton trade would help transform Texas, they also expected colonists to adapt to the rhythms and forms of Mexican civic life. Texas’ new colonial settlements were an experiment in hybridization, melding Anglo-American and Mexican traditions of city-planning and self-government and connecting northern Mexico to the burgeoning U.S. cotton trade.
The new town of San Felipe de Austin , which was surveyed by Seth Ingram between October 1823 and July 1824, provides a vivid example of this effort. Envisioned as a central hub of Austin’s colonization project, the new town was also designed to meet Mexican urban specifications. In fact, far from a simple colonial administrative center, San Felipe was meant to blossom into a full-fledged Mexican municipio (equivalent to a combined city and county government), the nation’s basic unit of republican governance.
Jean Louis Theodore Gentilz, Stick Stock (Surveyors in Texas before Annexation to the U.S.), ca. 1845, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the San Antonio Museum of Art.
The survey plat of San Felipe, originally drawn by Ingram to Austin's specifications, now exists only in the form of a copy made by Samuel May Williams and included in Austin's Registro in the GLO's Spanish Collection. It represents a fascinating blueprint for the process of hybridization. The plat imagines an idealized melding of Mexican and Anglo-American town-building traditions, combining Mexican preferences for urban density and public space with Anglo-American surveying methods and commercial orientations.
For various reasons, the town envisioned in Ingram’s plat never materialized. Though the Mexican government did order the creation of a constitutional ayuntamiento (municipal council) in San Felipe in 1827, Anglo settlement patterns, geographic factors, and political instability stunted the town in its infancy.
Worse, despite the good-faith efforts of Austin, San Felipe municipal leaders, and sympathetic local Tejanos, national political conflicts slowly overtook the project of colonization altogether, as unrest spread through Austin’s and other Anglo colonies after 1830. As Texas’ second largest town and the de facto capital of its Anglo population, San Felipe soon found itself reluctantly thrust into the center of the action, its fate tied to that of the Texas independence movement itself. It was burned to the ground by Texian military leaders as the Mexican army approached on March 29, 1836.
Project Outline
This StoryMap analyzes Ingram’s plat of San Felipe as a product of a unique experiment in frontier urban planning. Using original sources from the GLO and other repositories, it situates Ingram’s survey plat in the context of the Mexican municipal tradition, revisits the history of the town’s founding, and employs GIS mapping to explore the hybrid vision behind the plat’s creation. Finally, it analyzes the growing gap between Austin and Ingram’s vision and the complicated reality of colonial settlement, a disjuncture that ultimately doomed San Felipe and Mexican Texas as a whole.
The Spanish and Mexican Municipal Tradition
The orderly grid of streets and plazas on display in Ingram’s plat of San Felipe has a long history. Spanish officials made urban planning a major component of colonial policy since the early days of the Conquest, when conquistadores laid out new towns atop the ruins of Indigenous city-states in central Mexico. Post-conquest Mexico was not a blank slate: its former Indigenous rulers had built dense, complex urban centers and extensive public infrastructure long before the Spaniards arrived. Relying on Indigenous foundations, the conquerors recycled stone from destroyed Aztec temples into Catholic churches and government offices, reinforced pre-existing Indigenous administrative divisions, and repurposed pre-contact public space for new, colonial purposes.
Elsewhere, though, where disease and colonial violence destroyed and scattered Indigenous communities, Spanish rulers relied on the act of congregación, resettling dispersed populations into a central urban core under the watchful eye of friars and royal officials. From the Spanish perspective, congregation had the dual advantages of facilitating colonial surveillance and control while freeing up “excess” Indigenous lands for agricultural and mineral exploitation. Meanwhile, the congregated remnants of older Indigenous polities became new pueblos under the Spanish municipal model, which guaranteed their Indigenous members the right to communal control over pueblo lands and promised them a measure of self-governance.
As the Spanish colonial project pushed north from central Mexico in search of precious minerals and Indigenous converts in the seventeenth century, new city-planning policies became necessary. Spanish monarchs had proposed formal regulations for urban planning in the Americas as early as the 1570s, but these proved ill-suited to the frontier. Unlike the densely populated, urbanized landscape of the Central Mexican Plateau, New Spain’s far north was vast, arid, and dominated by semi-sedentary Indigenous groups that fiercely resisted congregation and Catholic conversion. In these circumstances, would-be settlers and Indigenous converts would need to create new towns “from scratch” in a frontier landscape.
Spanish expansion into the far north also coincided with a major set of colonial reforms introduced by the French monarchs of the House of Bourbon, rulers of the Spanish Empire from 1700 until the independence era. These “ Bourbon Reforms ” prioritized uniformity and a more rationalized approach to frontier defense and colonization.
In 1782, Bourbon officials also instituted new regulations for creating frontier towns. Known as the Plan of Pitic (named for the town in Sonora whose founding had prompted the new policy), these regulations allowed local commissioners to create new towns without the oversight of the Council of the Indies in Spain. They also allocated municipal grants of four leagues of land (nearly 18,000 acres) to new towns and provided instructions for surveying and distributing town lots and farming tracts to settlers. To receive title, potential settlers would have to fulfill several conditions, including contributing to frontier defense, settling and cultivating granted lands, and maintaining residence for four years before any private transfer.
The Plan of Pitic served as a model for subsequent town foundations, including in Texas. Though issued too late to impact San Fernando de Béxar (founded in 1731) or La Bahía (today, Goliad, founded in 1749), the Plan nevertheless provided the blueprint for the short-lived town of San Marcos de Neve , established at the junction of the Camino Real and the San Marcos River in 1808 and abandoned in 1812. Its provisions also strongly influenced further colonization legislation in the Mexican period.
Independence-era leaders in Mexico agreed with their Bourbon predecessors about the need to both encourage colonization of the frontier and tightly regulate urban planning. At the meetings of the 1823 Junta Instituyente, the body tasked with drafting the Imperial Colonization Law of 1823, the insurgent priest and statesman from Tamaulipas, Father José Antonio Gutiérrez de Lara, laid out a detailed and far-reaching colonization plan for Texas. He envisioned the frontier as an orderly grid of cities, pueblos, and villages, each internally planned to precise specifications. His plan stipulated that all houses be oriented in the same cardinal direction, that clocks be set to the same hour, and that plazas be of “regular” shape with space for government houses and parish churches.
Gutiérrez de Lara’s proposals did not make it into the Imperial Colonization Law or its successor, the National Colonization Law of 1824. However, the politician-priest’s ideas about uniformity and compactness strongly influenced the state colonization law of Tamaulipas, under whose auspices he served as surveyor general. This law facilitated over a hundred land grants in what is now South Texas.
The 1825 State Colonization Law of Coahuila y Texas also incorporated several city-planning provisions. One encouraged the mixing of Indigenous and European populations in new settlements; another prescribed straight, scientifically surveyed streets on a north-south grid. Other provisions mandated compact, regularly shaped land grants and set out instructions for creating ayuntamientos when local populations grew to a sufficient size.
Tensions between these Mexican provisions for urban compactness and the Anglo-American preference for living on dispersed ranching properties ultimately helped doom San Felipe de Austin.
Founding San Felipe de Austin
The State Colonization Law of 1825 imagined that foreign newcomers would settle within existing Mexican communities, or that, conversely, new towns would sprout organically from the countryside as more families moved to the area. By contrast, San Felipe was something resembling a “planned community.” Meant to serve as headquarters of Austin’s Colony, the first foreign colony approved by the Mexican government, it was created “from scratch” in an area with relatively few non-Indigenous residents. Settlers had been arriving on the lower reaches of the Brazos and Colorado rivers since early 1822, but their dispersed settlement patterns did not lend themselves to life in a town at the center of the sprawling colony.
The government decree that re-authorized Stephen F. Austin’s Spanish-era contract under the auspices of the (short-lived) Imperial Colonization Law in the spring of 1823 explicitly permitted Austin to establish “a pueblo or villa” at a central location for the colonists already in Texas and those he planned to recruit from the United States. It also empowered him to survey and sell town lots to settlers to finance the construction of a church, municipal hall, and other public buildings. Interim governor Luciano García , in consultation with commander of the Eastern Interior Provinces, Felipe de la Garza, had already chosen a name for the projected town. Appropriately, it would have a hybrid name, honoring both Garza’s patron saint, Saint Philip, and the Anglo-American empresario: San Felipe de Austin.
With the decree in hand, Austin set off with land commissioner Baron de Bastrop in August 1823 to scout for an appropriate location on either the Brazos or Colorado river, lodging in the cabins of recently established settlers such as Sylvanus Castleman and John McFarland .
In October, after visiting both locations, Bastrop wrote to García that he and Austin had chosen a spot on the Brazos River (likely the area around McFarland’s cabin) as the “most appropriate tract” available, given that it was:
Elevated, entirely free of inundation, and in a place where medium-sized vessels can arrive almost any time of the year.
As Bastrop noted, the lower reaches of the Brazos could accommodate even larger ships, thus allowing the new community to import finished items and export cotton via the Gulf of Mexico. However, the river later proved less suitable for commercial transport than initially thought.
Austin soon hired the immigrant surveyor Seth Ingram to survey and plat the new town according to the empresario’s own precise specifications. Mexican legislators were still debating the form of the national and regional government and had not yet issued detailed urban planning regulations for new frontier towns. The Imperial Colonization Law of 1823 included two articles providing for the creation of new towns, one of which mandated the laying out of “straight streets running north and south and east and west.” But more specific regulations would not come until 1828, when they were issued by the congress of the new state of Coahuila y Texas. In the interim, Austin had to come up with his own plan.
Even without instructions from the government, Austin adopted the Mexican municipal model for San Felipe, seemingly aware of local preferences and recent national debates about the need for rational urban planning on the frontier. Plazas, town lots, and lots for other public institutions were to be laid out to exact specifications on a grid of streets surveyed and named well in advance of any construction activity.
In short, under Austin’s direction, Ingram’s survey plat would represent a fully realized vision of a bustling Mexican town worthy of the status of colonial capital and future municipal seat. All Austin had to do, it seemed, was fill in the outline with actual buildings and settlers. This task proved much more difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, it is worth pausing to examine Austin and Ingram’s vision as it existed on paper, since it offers a glimpse of a unique experiment in city planning as a link between cultures.
Exploring the Plat of San Felipe
Seth Ingram’s plat, or survey map, of San Felipe de Austin is found only in the handmade compendium of land records known as Austin’s Registro, which resides in the GLO’s Spanish Collection. The unique plat serves as both the town’s blueprint and title. Though dozens of colonists had settled on the Brazos and Colorado rivers by the time that Ingram and his surveying team began work, San Felipe became the first formal grantee in the colony, receiving title to one hacienda, or five leagues (more than 22,000 acres) of land on July 1, 1824. According to Austin’s specifications, Ingram also laid out public plazas and hundreds of residential town lots and suburban farming plots known as “garden lots.”
Use the forward and reverse arrows below to explore the projected town’s hybrid features:
San Felipe’s Lived Reality
Though it could boast some modest achievements by the time of the Texas Revolution, San Felipe never lived up to the vision on display in the Ingram plat. The following section analyzes the town’s successes, challenges, and shortcomings, placing them in the context of the larger history of Mexican Texas.
Successes
Within a few years of its founding, San Felipe de Austin grew to a collection of perhaps two dozen houses and businesses, mostly log cabins constructed in the style favored by the Scots-Irish, German, and Nordic frontiersmen who dominated the small population of perhaps 200. The town’s title permitted its interim leadership to distribute lots, which Austin did in 1824, selling or donating 57 town lots and 14 garden lots. Austin and Bastrop earmarked several lots for municipal use around the plaza de la constitución, and they granted others to the artisans who helped build the town’s first structures. Further lot sales had to wait until the formation of a constitutional ayuntamiento, which itself depended on population growth.
The population of the town proper grew only slightly over the next few years, but the ranks of settlers scattered across the rest of the colony quickly swelled to several thousand. According to state law, the colony was now eligible to form an ayuntamiento, and Austin petitioned the state government to that effect in late 1827. The request was quickly granted. The new ayuntamiento would be headquartered in San Felipe and composed of one alcalde (municipal president or mayor), four regidores (council members), and one sindico procurador (municipal attorney). Its jurisdiction would include all of Austin’s first colony, extending north from the coast to the San Antonio Road and from the Lavaca River in the west to the San Jacinto River in the east.
Municipal elections took place in early 1828, and Austin formally handed over his interim political powers to an elected council. Comisarios (district constables) and prosecutors were also elected for the outlying settlements, such as Victoria and Mina (today, Bastrop ). This constituted a crucial step for carrying the authority of the ayuntamiento out to the far-flung Anglo settlements. Austin had already faced resistance to his authority as interim governor of the colony, and when he requested the creation of the ayuntamiento he had specifically asked the state government to appoint sheriffs for the outlying settlements to enforce municipal ordinances.
Roughly combining the powers of a city council and county commissioners court, the ayuntamiento was charged with keeping public order and making municipal improvements, taking the census, overseeing primary educational efforts and religious administration, organizing the militia, and enforcing state law and local regulations. They could also impose fines and short jail sentences upon “those who disobey them, disrespect them, or otherwise perturb the public order and calm.”
The new council immediately got to work, as evidenced by the minutes of the ayuntamiento, which exist only in the GLO archives. Councilors hired an interim secretary, brainstormed ideas for raising revenues for the construction of a municipal hall, jail, parish church, and school, sold another batch of town lots, and worked on creating a set of municipal ordinances.
One of the most pressing issues was the organization of the local civic militia, since Karankawa and Wichita bands often raided local homesteads. The ayuntamiento then turned its attention to other matters, including the licensing of practicing doctors, the crafting of environmental regulations, and working to curb public nuisances such as drunkenness, gambling, the discharging of firearms in town, and the proliferation of feral hogs.
By 1830, San Felipe could boast a primary school and a gristmill and lumber yard; and it hosted Texas’ first newspaper, The Texas Gazette. Around the commercial plaza, a number of stores and taverns had appeared and were engaged in a brisk business catering to immigrants who arrived daily to solicit land grants in Austin’s colony. Though the waters of the Brazos often proved unreliable for transportation at its higher reaches, a few steamships and keelboats plied its waters, mostly hauling slavery-dependent cotton crop out to coast and bringing back finished goods.
Challenges
Despite its successes, the new town council faced considerable challenges from the beginning. Money and personnel headed the list of woes. Its initial lot sales and ferry-licensing fees proved insufficient sources of revenue. Poor bookkeeping also plagued the council’s town lot program, creating confusion about lot availability and depressing the local real estate market. Compounding these problems, the ayuntamiento had great difficulty finding (and paying the salary of) a secretary fluent in Spanish, which was necessary for communicating with officials in Béxar, Saltillo, and Mexico City.
Much to Austin and Mexican leaders’ chagrin, the town itself also stagnated. The population plateaued at around 300 permanent residents in 1830, with men outnumbering women ten to one. Soon San Felipe developed a rowdy “boys’ town” culture, as single men poured into town to petition for land and visit local taverns and gambling houses before relocating to their newly acquired land grants. Few settler families decided to make the town their permanent home.
As one female resident told Noah Smithwick, an eyewitness to the rise and fall of Mexican Texas:
Texas was 'a heaven for men and dogs, but a hell for women and oxen.'
Stifled growth meant low revenues and stalled public works. The planned municipal hall never got off the ground, and the council instead found itself bouncing between rented cabins. The same fate awaited the parish church, which besides funds, also lacked firm support among the mostly Protestant settlers. Though Austin did organize a militia, the military plaza also remained undeveloped. And although hewn-log and a few framed buildings did cluster around the commercial plaza, commerce itself languished: problems with river navigation stifled trade, and a more vibrant market soon developed in rival Brazoria.
From Austin and Mexican leaders’ perspective, a major source of such stagnation was dispersal: Anglo colonists simply preferred to live in far-flung homesteads rather than in a compact town. As early as 1823, Austin had “been trying to make people move together,” as he put it, but his efforts were mostly in vain. Mexican authorities made note of the odd development style. The cartographer José María Sánchez y Tapia, passing through San Felipe as part of the 1828 boundary commission led by Manuel de Mier y Terán, described the town as 40-50 wood houses that “were not arranged systematically so as to form streets, but on the contrary lie in an irregular and desultory manner.” Another member of Terán’s party, the naturalist Jean-Louis Berlandier , agreed: “San Felipe is not populous because most live among their fields.” In the town itself, “dwellings [were] scattered about after the manner of new Anglo-American towns.”
The ayuntamiento even struggled with the problem of dispersal within its own ranks. Some of its members lived up to 30 leagues (12 miles) from town, necessitating stipends for travel to and from meetings. Meanwhile, local ordinances mandating the quick improvement of city lots had to be modified several times to encourage lot purchasers to stay put.
Ironically, Austin and his secretary, Samuel May Williams , were themselves partly responsible for this sprawl. By 1830, both had abandoned the town core, preferring to establish their homes and land operations in the garden lots north of town. Austin’s close allies followed suit, such that by 1830 San Felipe really constituted three distinct and poorly connected “neighborhoods”: the suburban garden lot settlement clustered around Austin and William’s homes; the town core around the plaza de comercio, and “Spanish Town.”
Colony land office operations were moved to Samuel May Williams' garden lot (number 26) around 1830.
Spanish Town was probably located south of town between the river and the undeveloped Hospicio (asylum) lot. There, several interconnected Tejano families dedicated to the vaquero trade had built jacales and other structures such as livestock pens and stables. Though men from the Mancha, Leal, and other Tejano families did vote in municipal elections, the existence of a separate “Spanish Town” suggests that they did not integrate with the newcomers to the extent envisioned by the designers of Mexican colonization laws.
Approximate location of "Spanish Town" on the San Felipe plat.
The Built Environment of San Felipe de Austin
The result of these various challenges and pressures was a growing gap between Austin and Ingram’s optimistic vision of San Felipe and the reality “on the ground.” One way to appreciate this disjuncture is by comparing the original Ingram plat with data showing where San Felipe residents actually built houses and buildings before the town’s 1836 demise. The interactive map below uses data on the built environment of San Felipe compiled by historian Michael Moore to show the uneven, scattered development of the town between 1823 and 1836.
Press play below to see the evolution of San Felipe’s built environment. Click on individual dots to learn more about the structures built there.
[Seth Ingram, Stephen F. Austin, and Samuel May Williams], Plan de la Villa de Austin [Plat of San Felipe de Austin], 1828, Map #94116 , General Map Collection, Archives and Records Program, Texas General Land Office, Austin, TX.
Conclusions: Destruction and Rebirth
Stagnation and sprawl certainly hampered San Felipe’s growth. But it was the larger political conflicts between Texas and Mexico City in the 1830s that ultimately sealed its fate. Austin’s colonists had chafed at some aspects of Mexican political culture (the lack of jury trials, required conversion to Catholicism, widespread anti-slavery sentiments) from the beginning. Although Austin had generally defended his adoptive country in the early years of the colony, this became more difficult after 1830, when Mexican leaders began trying to curtail Anglo immigration and enforce new laws on tariffs and slavery.
By 1832, San Felipe had become a hub of political ferment, as settlers organized conventions to draw up grievances with the Mexican government and request concessions such as tariff exemptions and separate Texas statehood. Austin’s arrest in 1833 and the decidedly centralist turn of the Mexican national government in 1834 ratcheted up tensions. In October 1835, Gail Borden, brother of first Texas Land Commissioner John P. Borden, inaugurated the Telegraph and Texas Register, the mouthpiece of the Texian revolutionary movement. Not surprisingly, the town soon became the seat of the Consultation , the body tasked with deciding on the question of Texas’ secession from Mexico. The town found itself at the center of the storm.
Geo. E. Perine, “ Gail Borden ,” n.d., in S.L. Goodale’s A brief sketch of Gail Borden, and his relations to some forms of concentrated food. Portland: B. Thurston, 1872.
The violence of the Texas Revolution soon engulfed the region, reducing San Felipe to ashes. News of the fall of the Alamo reached San Felipe in mid-March 1836, triggering the Runaway Scrape , when colonists fled eastward in front of the advancing Mexican Army. Amid the general panic, Samuel May Williams hastily packed up Austin’s colony records into trunks and evacuated them under armed escort. Had he not done so, the GLO as we know it know might not exist.
On March 29, 1836, troops under Captain Moseley Baker, hoping to deny crucial supplies to the approaching Mexican army, put the torch to the town before moving across the Brazos to build fortifications with which to defend the ferry crossing. By the time Santa Anna’s army arrived on April 6, the town was a smoldering ruin of burnt cabins, house-less brick chimneys, and piles of broken china.
Attempts to rebuild San Felipe began immediately after the Revolution, but most of its former residents had already resettled in Columbia, Harrisburg, or Houston. A short-lived attempt to promote San Felipe as the seat of the new government of the Republic of Texas failed for pragmatic reasons—the government needed a place to meet immediately.
Former residents and several new waves of immigrants (including Germans, liberated African Americans, and Mexicans) trickled back into San Felipe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1928, the town of San Felipe donated lands out of its historic 1824 footprint for the creation of a memorial park, which was transferred to the state in 1939. Today, this park is known as Stephen F. Austin State Park. The nearby San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site, operated by the Texas Historical Commission, maintains a separate site that today features monuments, replicas of several original structures, and a new museum. The historic campo santo still exists, as do several of the historic roads seen on the Ingram plat.
Museum and Visitor's Center at the San Felipe de Austin Historic Site. Image courtesy of the San Felipe de Austin Historic Site, Texas Historical Commission.
Explore Further
Barker, Eugene C. The Life of Stephen F. Austin, the Founder of Texas, 1793-1836. 3rd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980.
Cantrell, Gregg. Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Cruz, Gilbert R. Let There Be Towns: Spanish Municipal Origins in the American Southwest, 1610-1810. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988.
Greaser, Galen D. That They May Possess and Enjoy the Land: The Spanish and Mexican Land Commissioners of Texas (1720-1836). Self-published, 2022.
Hardin, Stephen L. Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Henson, Margaret Swett. “San Felipe de Austin: Capital of the Austin Colony.” Paper delivered at Stephen F. Austin University, October 28, 1993.
Moore, Michael Rugeley. San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site. Austin: Texas Historical Commission, 2018.
Moore, Michael Rugeley. “Regulation Double Log Cabins: The Built Environment of San Felipe de Austin,” unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author, 2014.
Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
Smithwick, Noah. The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days. Compiled by His Daughter, Nanna Smithwick Donaldson. Austin: Gammel Book Co., 1900.
Tijerina, Andrés. Tejanos and Texas Under the Mexican Flag, 1821-1836. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994.
Torget, Andrew. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Weber, David. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.
