The History of San Augustine, Texas

The story of San Augustine begins with the Ais (or Ayish) people, a band of the Hasinai, who lived along the bayou that still bears their name. In 1717 the Spanish missionary Father Antonio Margil de Jesus established Nuestra Senora de los Dolores de los Ais — Mission Dolores — near their village. Abandoned during a French scare in 1719, it was reestablished in 1721 by the Marques de San Miguel de Aguayo, becoming a focus of early Spanish settlement in East Texas.

What made the spot matter was the road. El Camino Real de los Tejas — the King's Highway, also called the Old San Antonio Road — ran past the bayou on its way from the Rio Grande to Louisiana, just twenty miles to the east. That artery made the Ayish Bayou district a natural gateway, and as Anglo-American settlers pushed west into Mexican Texas in the 1820s, this was one of the first places they put down roots.

By the late 1820s a settlement had taken shape in the Ayish Bayou district, and in 1827 its residents held their first municipal elections. A few years later they decided to lay out a proper town. In January 1833 the community bought land from Edmund Quirk for ninety dollars, and Thomas S. McFarland was appointed to survey it, platting 356 lots across forty-eight blocks in a neat grid. Mexican officials are said to have chosen the name San Augustine to honor St. Augustine of Hippo.

The municipality of San Augustine was organized in 1834, and the town was incorporated in 1837, the same year the University of San Augustine was chartered — an early sign of the town's ambitions. This was a place of lawyers, planters, and politics: San Augustine was among the most important towns of the Republic of Texas, and it has long claimed to be the oldest Anglo-American town in the state, the 'Cradle of Texas.'

San Augustine flourished in the Republic and antebellum years on cotton and trade. Wealthy planters built fine Greek Revival homes — many by the master builder Augustus Phelps — and the town drew figures of consequence. Sam Houston kept a home and law practice here and was first appointed general and elected to office representing this district. Cotton gins, gristmills, and sawmills worked the surrounding country, and the town's leaders shaped early Texas at the bayou's edge.

The arrival of the Gulf, Beaumont and Great Northern Railway in 1901 reconnected San Augustine to the wider world, and a handsome new courthouse rose in 1927. The cotton economy gave way over time to timber and ranching, and the population, which peaked above 2,500 in mid-century, settled into the steady small town of today — a county seat that wears its deep history openly in its surviving antebellum homes and its historic sites.