6/7/1842: Republic grants large tract to prospective colonizers

[Craig Tx]

On this day in 1842, the Republic of Texas granted three million acres between the Llano and Colorado rivers to Henry Fisher, Burchard Miller, and Joseph Baker.

The Fisher-Miller Grant, as the tract is called, was one of many colonization projects in early Texas that largely fizzled. The land was to be settled by one thousand families of German, Dutch, Swiss, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian ancestry. When Fisher and Miller failed to colonize the grant within the allotted time, the Congress of the republic extended the deadline. Fisher got President Houston to appoint him consul to Bremen in 1843, and the next year he sold part of his interest to the Adelsverein, a German colonization society. In December 1845 both Fisher and Miller sold their remaining rights in the grant to the Germans. The Adelsverein managed to plant only a few colonists on the grant, however; only the settlement of Castell survived. Other colonists moved to Fredericksburg or New Braunfels and sold their Fisher-Miller lots.