Fort Bend Museum
Independence Trail Region
The Fort Bend Museum features items that document the settlement, agriculture, community development, and local government of the region. This collection explores the early 1800s colony of Stephen F. Austin – the empresario who started the first large-scale introduction of Anglo-Americans into Mexican Tejas from the southern United States.
By the end of 1824, most of Austin’s first group of settlers – now known as the “Old 300” – were in Texas. It was this contingent and the thousands of other self-styled “Texians” who came after them whose resistance to Mexico’s centralist government catalyzed the movement that would, in time, become the Texas Revolution.