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Republic grants large tract to prospective colonizers
On this day in 1842, the Republic of Texas granted three million acres
between the Llano and Colorado rivers to Henry Fisher, Burchard Miller,
and Joseph Baker. The Fisher-Miller Grant, as the tract is called, was
one of many colonization projects in early Texas that largely fizzled.
The land was to be settled by one thousand families of German, Dutch,
Swiss, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian ancestry. When Fisher and Miller
failed to colonize the grant within the allotted time, the Congress of
the republic extended the deadline. Fisher got President Houston to
appoint him consul to Bremen in 1843, and the next year he sold part of
his interest to the Adelsverein, a German colonization society. In
December 1845 both Fisher and Miller sold their remaining rights in the
grant to the Germans. The Adelsverein managed to plant only a few
colonists on the grant, however; only the settlement of Castell
survived. Other colonists moved to Fredericksburg or New Braunfels and
sold their Fisher-Miller lots.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- FISHER-MILLER LAND GRANT
- FISHER, HENRY FRANCIS
- MILLER, BURCHARD
- BAKER, JOSEPH
- ADELSVEREIN
- LAND GRANTS
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Construction begins on future Fort Sam Houston (1876)
- Novelist dies after fistfight (1979)
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