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Republic of Texas authorizes ill-fated Peters colony
On this day in 1841, the Republic of Texas passed a law authorizing the
president to enter into an empresario contract with William S. Peters of
Pennsylvania and his associates. The contract required Peters to bring
200 colonists to North Texas every three years. The colony was
headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, and its bumpy history contrasts
sharply with that of such earlier colonies as the Austin colony partly
because the successful earlier empresarios lived in their colonies and
managed them personally. After the initial authorizing law, the Peters
colony entered four contracts with the republic. Each was an effort to
correct some defect in the previous one, or to relax the demands of the
government on colony officials, who failed to bring in the requisite
colonists. Peters and his investors soon gave up, and in 1844 the Texas
Emigration and Land Company was founded to take over the colony. The
company continued the earlier management's precedents for rapacious
demands on the colonists and inept management. The installation in 1845
of the officious Henry O. Hedgcoxe as the company's agent in residence
inflamed the colonists and precipitated the Hedgcoxe War, in which the
agent was driven from the colony. A settlement was eventually reached,
and the deadline for colonists to file their claims was extended to May
7, 1853. But it took nearly ten legislative enactments over nearly
twenty years to bring final settlement of the land titles. The colony
that helped settle North Texas brought little if any profit to the
investors and much disgruntlement to the settlers.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- PETERS COLONY
- PETERS, WILLIAM SMALLING
- EMPRESARIO
- HEDGCOXE WAR
- ANGLO-AMERICAN COLONIZATION
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Hero from Rio Grande valley dies in Vietnam (1968)
- La Bahía becomes Goliad (1829)
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