SAN MARCOS DE NEVE. San Marcos de Neve, one of the last Spanish attempts at colonization in Texas, was founded in the early nineteenth century four miles below the site of present San Marcos, where the Old San Antonio Road crossed the San Marcos River. It was intended as part of a chain of defensive settlements stretching from Bexar to Nacogdoches and was personally funded by the Spanish governor of Texas, Manuel Antonio Cordero y Bustamante. Cordero charged Felipe Roque de la Portilla with leadership of the expedition to reestablish a Spanish presence on the San Marcos, where the San Xavier missions had been temporarily relocated fifty years earlier. Colonists for the San Marcos villa were recruited from south of the Rio Grande rather than from Bexar and Louisiana. The first group of colonists set out from Refugio (now Matamoros) in December 1807 and by February 1808 had settled near the San Marcos crossing. Lt. Juan Ignacio Arrambide was appointed justicia (magistrate) of the town, with power to issue titles to land. Estimates of the villa's size vary from about fifty to eighty people, including perhaps a dozen families and servants and as many as 1,700 animals-cattle, horses, and mules. A central plaza had been laid out and titles issued to thirteen town lots when a flood on June 5, 1808, nearly wiped out the nascent community. The colony held out for several years, but harassment by Comanche and Tonkawa Indians finally forced its abandonment in 1812.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bexar Land Papers (Spanish Collection, Texas General Land Office, Austin). Dudley Richard Dobie, A Brief History of Hays County and San Marcos, Texas (San Marcos, 1948). Tula Townsend Wyatt, Historical Markers in Hays County (San Marcos, Texas: Hays County Historical Commission, 1977).
