BRADLEY, JOHN (?-?). John Bradley, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, arrived in Texas before April 20, 1824, when he took his oath of allegiance in the home of James B. (Brit) Baileyqv. Bradley, who had known the family of Moses Austin in Missouri around 1820, received title to a league of land in what is now Brazoria County on July 8, 1824. The 1826 colonial census showed him as a farmer and stock raiser aged between twenty-five and forty, with a wife, Betsy, a son, and a daughter. He wrote S. F. Austin on June 30, 1826, that he had settled on the east side of the Brazos River and asked for a labor of land at the mouth of the river. He may have been the same John Bradley whose name appeared on the Colorado County tax rolls in 1840 and the Lavaca County rolls in 1846. A John Bradley of Fayette County also was among those captured with Nicholas Dawson in October 1842 and held at Perote Prison in Mexico until September 22, 1843.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eugene C. Barker, ed., The Austin Papers (3 vols., Washington: GPO, 1924-28 Paul C. Boethel, The History of Lavaca County (San Antonio: Naylor, 1936; rev. ed., Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1959 Lester G. Bugbee, "The Old Three Hundred: A List of Settlers in Austin's First Colony," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 1 (October 1897 Leonie Rummel Weyand and Houston Wade, An Early History of Fayette County (La Grange, Texas: La Grange Journal, 1936).
