Smith Ranch

The Smith Ranch was established in 1887. Its historical context provides background information about the patterns of history and development that shaped the ranch and the surrounding geographic area. This rural historic landscape is nominated for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in the areas of Agriculture and Settlement, Economics for association with Lowell Smith, Sr., and for its archeological potential to yield information important to prehistory and history. As a rural historic landscape, the Smith Ranch possesses a significant concentration, linkage, and continuity of areas of land use, buildings and structures, roads and waterways, and natural features. Archeological evidence of the earliest local habitation by both Anglo-American settlers and semi-nomadic Native Americans can be found on the property. The historic fabric of the Smith Ranch landscape in relationship to the surrounding community is quite significant. Lowell Smith Sr. is recognized by the local community as having played a vital role in developing Rio Vista and neighboring communities. His contributions to the banking industry were recognized in their time and today as innovative and significant. The property retains historic and architectural integrity to a good degree.

Settlement

Philip Nolan, the Nolan River & the Cross Timbers Expedition of 1801
The Nolan River is named for an Irish explorer, mustanger, and protégé of General James Wilkinson of Kentucky, a friend of Aaron Burr and commander of U.S. forces in Louisiana. Philip Nolan (1771-1801) lived with Wilkinson and served him as a bookkeeper and shipping clerk from 1788 until 1791. Nolan is believed to have drawn the first Anglo-American map of Texas, which has never been found. Still, his observations made their way to Wilkinson, who produced a map of the Texas-Louisiana frontier around 1804.

Nolan, who was one of the earliest Anglo-Americans to enter Spanish Texas and the Cross Timbers region, first visited Texas in 1791 on a trading expedition and lived with Comanches and other northern tribes for two years before returning to New Orleans with fifty mustangs. In 1794 he obtained permission in San Antonio de Bexar to obtain horses for the Louisiana regiment and returned 250 Mustangs in 1795. He headed to Texas again in 1797 with trade goods, even though trade between Louisiana and Texas was prohibited. Spanish officials became suspicious about his loyalties and believed he might be stirring up the native tribes in Texas against Spanish rule by procuring horses and mapping the interior for the United States military. Nolan returned to Natchez in 1799 with more than 1,200 horses.

Nolan left Natchez again in October of 1800 with a well-armed group of at least 27 men but without a passport. He erected a small fortification with corrals at a Brazos River tributary, believed by many to be between Blum and Rio Vista. He was killed there in March of 1801 by Spanish troops from Nacogdoches sent to intercept him. His men were captured, tried, and sent to prison. Because of the decade he spent in Texas, Nolan has become recognized, accurately or not, as the first in a line of many armed attempts to free Texas from Spanish and Mexican control. A granite marker was erected in Nolan's memory about four miles south of Rio Vista on Highway 174.