DeWitt County Historical Museum

10/15/2026

Another little known piece of Texas history.

A Texas doctor saved Santa Anna's life in 1836, and years later Santa Anna saved the doctor's son.

After San Jacinto, the Texans had to keep their famous prisoner somewhere. In the summer of 1836 Santa Anna was moved to Orozimbo, the cotton plantation of Dr. James A. E. Phelps in Brazoria County, and held there under guard into the fall.

He was a beaten man. He sank into despair and tried to take his own life with an overdose. Dr. Phelps found out in time and brought him back.

The doctor and his wife treated their prisoner with real kindness for the rest of his stay, and Santa Anna never forgot it.

Years later, the Phelpses' young son Orlando joined the Mier Expedition, a Texas raid into Mexico that ended in disaster. He was captured with the rest and taken deep into Mexico as a prisoner.

When Santa Anna, back in power, learned that a prisoner named Phelps was the son of the doctor from Orozimbo, he ordered him released. He had the young man outfitted with new clothes, gave him money, and sent him home to Texas.

The Phelps house at Orozimbo is long gone, ruined by a hurricane in 1932. But the debt between those two families was paid.

10/15/2026

There is a ditch running through the south side of San Antonio that has been moving water to farmland since before the United States existed, and it is still moving it this morning.

The Espada acequia was begun around 1731 and finished by 1745. Spanish engineers laid it out by gravity alone, following a grade so slight that water walks it rather than runs, about twenty three inches of fall per mile today. Where the ditch had to cross a creek, they built an aqueduct in the 1740s: two cut limestone arches with a diamond shaped pier between them, set point first upstream so a flood splits against it instead of shoving it over. The channel on top is four feet wide and four feet deep.

Before that, the water crossed the creek in hollowed out logs.

It is the only Spanish colonial aqueduct in the country still standing and still carrying water. In 1897 a flood ran roughly six feet over the top of it and it stayed put. The mortar has a reputation for having been mixed with egg whites and goat's milk, which is a good story and is not true. What actually happened is less romantic and more impressive. Lime dissolved in the river water precipitated out into the masonry year after year until the structure quietly cemented itself.

Of the seven acequias the missions dug, totaling about fifteen miles, only two still flow, and only one still works the way it was designed to.

The farmers downstream never measured water by the gallon. They measured it in hours. A water hour was your turn, and in 1895 it cost a dollar and by 1968 it cost ten. A ditch commissioner kept the turns honest and had authority to shut a gate on anybody taking more than their share. The Spanish even had a word for the amount of land you could water in a day, a suerte, and over time the word drifted until it simply meant a farm plot.

About a dozen properties still take water off it. Two hundred and eighty years is a long run for a public works project.

10/14/2026

10/14/2026

10/14/2026

10/13/2026

10/12/2026

Josiah Taylor was one of those who escaped during the Battle of Medina. Taylor had lived Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. He returned to Texas in the early 1824 with his wife and family to settle on a Spanish land grant that would now be located on HWY 87S of Cuero a few miles. He died before the grant was complete and in 1825, Mexico secured its independence from Spain. The Mexican government granted the land to Josiah’s wife Hepsibeth. Some of the Taylors eventually moved westward, but many people in the DeWitt County area are descended from Josiah and Hepsibeth or Hepsibeth and her second husband Patrick Dowlearn.

10/11/2026

All 30 facts are not included!