Kerr's

James Kerr, soldier, attorney, surveyor, and physician, was born near Danville, Kentucky, on September 24, 1790. In 1808 his Baptist minister father moved the family to Missouri. Kerr fought in the War of 1812 under Nathaniel Boone and achieved the rank of lieutenant. Thereafter he was sheriff of St. Charles County, Missouri. In 1819 he married Angela Caldwell and moved with his bride to Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. He served two terms in the House and one in the Senate as a representative of the Sainte Genevieve district.

In January 1825 Kerr was appointed surveyor general of the Texas colony of Green DeWitt. In April or May he took his family and about eight slaves to Brazoria, where he joined the colony of his close friend, Stephen F. Austin. Later that year his wife and two of his children died of cholera at their camp on the San Bernard River. Leaving his surviving three-year-old daughter with friends in San Felipe, he set out with Erastus (Deaf) Smith and five other men to select a site for the capital of the DeWitt colony. In August 1825 the men built cabins on Kerr's Creek near the junction of the San Marcos and Guadalupe rivers and made plans for the establishment of Gonzales. The next year the makeshift huts were destroyed by Indian raiders. In January 1827 Kerr acted as attorney and surveyor for Benjamin Rush Milam. The same year Austin dispatched Kerr, James Cummins, and Richard Ellis to Nacogdoches to attempt to persuade Haden Edwards to abandon his Fredonian Rebellion. In May 1827 Kerr signed a treaty with the Karankawa Indians. The same month, as one of the Old Three Hundred, he received title to a league now in Jackson County. He settled this holding and reportedly brought in the first crop in the county. The Kerr cabin became a center where new settlers were routinely greeted and entertained. On December 15, 1830, the ayuntamiento of San Felipe de Austin ordered a favorable report on Kerr's petition for additional land because of services he had rendered for the public good.