Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, January 1996 Page: 6
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Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal
known as the Allen Branch hits the river, and within the league of land that would be granted
to Rawson Alley. The site was commonly called the Atascosito Crossing, but was also
known to Spaniards and Mexicans by another name: Montezuma.5 Rawson Alley and his
brothers, Abraham, John C., and Thomas V., settled on the east side of the river near the
Atascosito Crossing in 1821 and 1822. They would be joined there in 1824 by another
brother, William.6
A census of the district dated March 4, 1823 listed 135 people in 49 households.
Of the 46 people for whom occupations were listed, 32 were engaged in farming. Four of
the farmers listed two occupations. Two were also merchants, one a schoolmaster, and one
a millwright. Among those who did not farm there were two tanners, two carpenters, one
stone mason, and one sawyer, two blacksmiths, one farrier, and one saddler, a silversmith,
one tailor and one clothier, and a surveyor. Of the men, twenty-three were in their twenties,
fourteen in their thirties, eight in their forties, and five in their fifties. Of the women, seven
were in their twenties, five in their thirties, and four in their forties. There were 38 males,
31 females, and one person whose gender could not be determined who were less than
twenty years old. The oldest person, Nicholas Clopper, was 55 years old. The oldest
women, Mary Bright and Elizabeth Tumlinson, were 45.7
The earliest settlers certainly attempted to introduce the trappings of civiliza-
tion to their wilderness as rapidly as possible. Perhaps as early as 1823, the settlers on the
Colorado established a school and provided a building for it near the river at a site that was
probably a few miles north of Beeson's Crossing, within what would later become the City
of Columbus. The son of Thomas Williams, Thomas Johnson Williams, who by his
recollection left the area in June 1823, attended the school for three months. The teacher
5 Various sources vaguely equate Montezuma with the present site of Columbus. However, David H.
Burr's 1833 map of Texas places Montezuma at the point where the Atascosito Road crosses the river, and Jose
Enrique de la Pefia, in his "diary" published in Carmen Perry's English translation as With Santa Anna in Texas
(College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1975), described the campsite of the Mexican army on May 5, 1836 as
"on the Colorado River at the Moctezuma Pass, also known as that of Atascosito" (p. 166). Interestingly, the
place at which the Bexar Road crossed the Colorado, well upriver from Montezuma, though it too apparently
had no population, also bore a name: Mina (see Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of
Old Texas Days (Austin: Gammel Book Company, 1900), p. 199). Later, the town of Bastrop would be
established on the site of Mina. The site of Montezuma, however, would never develop into any sort of
community.
6 Kuykendall, "Reminiscences of Early Texans," The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical
Association, vol. 7, no. 1, July 1903, p. 47.
7 Ernest William Winkler, ed., Manuscript Letters and Documents of Early Texians 1821-1845
(Austin: The Steck Company, 1937), pp. 18-22. On January 4, 1823, the Mexican national government enacted
legislation which prevented the sale or purchase of slaves within the empire, and declared that children of slaves
who were thereafter born in the empire would be freed at age fourteen. The government which enacted that law,
however, was shortly afterward overthrown, and the law was subsequently annulled (see Randolph B. Campbell,
An Empire for Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 15-16). Still, the fact that
the law had been passed may explain why no slaves were listed as such on the March 4, 1823 census.
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Nesbitt Memorial Library. Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, January 1996, periodical, January 1996; Columbus, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth151396/m1/6/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Nesbitt Memorial Library.