HEMPSTEAD, Texas
Archaeologists are combing through a site about 50 miles northwest of Houston that nearly two centuries ago became Texas' largest plantation and then a staging area for Gen. Sam Houston's troops before the decisive Battle of San Jacinto.
The project that started this summer seeks to detail and preserve remains of Bernardo, a plantation established along the Brazos River in 1822 by Jared Ellison Groce II, one of the “Old Three Hundred” settlers of Stephen F. Austin's colony who received land grants from Spain.
“If you read any of the early documents about the fight for Texas independence, this plantation site figured prominently in that,” said Jim Bruseth, director of the Texas Historical Commission's archaeology division. “Anybody of any importance came through here.”
Archaeologists from the commission last week brought in supersensitive ground radar and magnetic detection devices that resemble high-tech baby strollers to scan the property and make electronic underground pictures of what now is a pasture used primarily for grazing horses and cattle.
The buildings at Bernardo have long disappeared. An old cistern -- out of which a tree has grown for years -- is the only visible evidence of long-ago generations.
Preliminary findings from the electronic tests show signs of what's believed to be building foundations.
“So far, the remote sensing work is indicating there's some really good intact deposits,” Bruseth said.
The original structures included a 1 1/2-story log house known as the “Big House,” quarters for travelers, a detached kitchen and dairy, and a home for an on-site physician who may have been the first doctor in Texas. The Groce family also had a schoolhouse, stables and other structures. Slave quarters included multiple cabins, a kitchen and nursery, a cotton gin and blacksmith shop, and a home for their overseer.
Groce, a native Virginian, had moved to Georgia and then Alabama when Austin's plans for a new colony in Texas --and maybe some angry creditors ---persuaded him to relocate his family, livestock, 100 slaves and some 50 wagons to the east bank of the Brazos, just south of Hempstead in Waller County.
