2/8/1830: Last Franciscan in early Texas relinquishes missions

[Craig Tx]

On this day in 1830, Jose Antonio Diaz de Leon, the last Franciscan missionary in prerepublic Texas, reluctantly complied with the Mexican state government decree that missions be secularized--that is, turned over to diocesan authorities.

Diaz de Leon had been appointed ad interim president of all the Texas missions in 1820, three years before the Mexican government ordered their final secularization. Diaz de Leon declined to comply without instructions from his superiors in Zacatecas, the first in a series of delays that lasted seven years. Diaz de Leon surrendered the San Antonio missions to the Diocese of Monterrey in 1824. In 1826 he was officially named president of the Texas missions. But Anglo settlers wanted the mission properties, and in 1829 the town of Goliad (formerly La Bahia) obtained a new decree to enforce secularization. Diaz de Leon continued to resist, but on February 8, 1830, he finally surrendered the last remaining missions. The mission lands, as he had expected, were soon made available to colonists. The bishop of Monterrey assigned him a parish post in Nacogdoches. Diaz de Leon was murdered on November 4, 1834. He was the thirty-first, and last, Zacatecan missionary to die in Texas. In 1926 the German author Robert Streit published a historical novel about Diaz de Leon; the work remains untranslated.