DeWitt County Historical Museum

09/07/2026

09/07/2026

190 years ago today, September 5, 1836, Sam Houston was elected to be the first President of the Republic of Texas.

He served two terms as President, his first from 1836-1838, then a second term from 1841-1844. He eventually realized his long term goal of joining Texas to the United States.

09/07/2026

Anglo American settlers to Texas were often Scots Irish, Scots, or Irish who settled the British colonies early on. Later generations moved into the Ohio Territory, the Appalachian foothills and beyond, and generations even later populated the American South — and Texas. By that time they were known as “Anglo” American. All of these people were not descendants of the English!

09/07/2026

Soon the plastic will be coming up and items will be put in place for semi opening the first floor of the Museum. We will post times that we can be open, depending on painters and crew doing upstairs work.

09/06/2026

This Goliad event happened before the Battle of Medina decimated the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition. Remember that Josiah Taylor was one of the few survivors of that Expedition after the Battle of Medina. He went home to Georgia, gathered his family, and returned to Texas with them after it came under Mexican rule. He began to settle in what is today DeWitt County. You can see the Taylor Cemetery south of Cuero on Hwy 87 S if you turn at the sign that identifies it. Josiah and his wife Hepsibeth ( who eventually was given the land grant after Josiah died) are buried there along with many descendants and friends.

09/06/2026

Artwork is an artist perception rather than reality, but the story is right.

09/06/2026

Ten miles northeast of Sinton, along the Aransas River, there is a piece of Coastal Bend country that a cattleman handed over to the deer.

Robert Hughes Welder was born at Victoria in 1891 and was a rancher and an outdoorsman his whole life. The land had been in the family a long while by then. His great-grandfather came over from Bavaria and stepped ashore at El Copano in 1833, and his grandfather John married Dolores Power in 1850 and put together something close to a hundred thousand acres of South Texas.

Rob Welder loved that country the way a man loves a room he grew up in. By every account, what he enjoyed most in the world was loading up a bunch of friends and driving them out across the open parts of the ranch. He married Bessie at Sinton in the fall of 1951. He died at his ranch home on the last day of 1953.

Then they opened the will. He had set aside 7,800 acres of uncultivated Welder ranchland, and he had not left it to a person. He left it to the wildlife, for research and for teaching, and the refuge began operating the very next year. He left the town of Sinton three hundred acres too, which people know today as Rob and Bessie Welder Park.

Clarence Cottam, one of the best known conservationists in the country, came down to run the place and stayed until he died in 1973. He started a summer workshop for schoolteachers out there in 1957. Since 1955 the foundation has put more than three hundred graduate students from sixty-six universities through that land, and more than three hundred theses and dissertations have come out of it. And it is still a working cattle ranch, which was precisely Welder's design: study the wild things right in the middle of a place that is genuinely being ranched.

Rob and Bessie are buried out there. He did not go to a town cemetery. He stayed on the ground he gave away, out among the wild things he left it to.

09/03/2026