DeCros Point

DeCros Point, also known as DeCrow's Point, Decros or DeCrow's Landing, Port Cavallo, Port Cabello, and Paso Cavallo, was an early coastal community on the western end of Matagorda Peninsula at Cavallo Pass in extreme southern Matagorda County. It was one of several settlements established on the peninsula before the region's recurring hurricanes persuaded the residents to leave. DeCrow's Point, which was probably named after Maine immigrant Daniel D. DeCrow, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, may have been inhabited as early as the 1820s by members of the seafaring DeCrow family, one of whom had a land grant there. Thomas DeCrow, who with his family settled in the area by 1837 and was a successful stock raiser there, constructed a wharf and also piloted vessels through Pass Cavallo into Matagorda Bay. Mary Ann (Adams) Maverick, who with her husband Samuel Augustus Maverick lived at DeCrow's Point, then also known as Paso Cavallo, from 1844 to 1847, includes her vivid accounts of life at DeCrow's Point and at the Mavericks' farm on the peninsula, Tiltona, in her Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick (1921). In 1847 Samuel Maverick traded several slaves for shares in the DeCrow townsite. A post office called Port Cavallo, or possibly Port Cabello, was established that year and remained open intermittently until 1853. Postal records suggest the site was part of Calhoun County between 1848 and 1852.

By 1854 the peninsula had two of the county's six school districts. From 1848 to the Civil War Pass Cavallo saw its heaviest ship traffic, and in his autobiographical A Texas Cow Boy (first published 1885), peninsula-born Charles A. Siringo writes of the early 1860s landing at "Deckrows Point" of "about five thousand Yankees" headed for the Confederate camp at the mouth of Caney Creek. When the hurricane of 1875, which also wiped out the nearby "German settlement," uprooted Thomas DeCrow's special storm-resistant house, thereby dooming some twenty-two people, it may well have ended the settlement, as no other information on it is available. In 1990 the site retained the name Decros Point.

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Rachel Jenkins | © TSHA

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Adapted from the official Handbook of Texas, a state encyclopedia developed by Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). It is an authoritative source of trusted historical records.

Belongs to

DeCros Point is part of or belongs to the following places:

Currently Exists

No

Place type

DeCros Point is classified as a Town

Associated Names

  • [DeCrow's-]
  • [-Landing]
  • (Port Cavallo)

Location

Latitude: 28.40361410
Longitude: -96.37386240

Has Post Office

No

Is Incorporated

No