La Bahia Road / Upper Coushatta Trace - Anderson, TX
Posted by: 
jhuoni
N 30° 29.170 W 095° 59.090
15R E 213469 N 3376446
Located on Fanthrop Street near Woodward Avenue in Historic Anderson, Texas.
Waymark Code: WMVJKX
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 04/25/2017
Views: 5
This marker placed by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas in 2008, tells of two historic area roads.
Marker Text:
This short stretch of road is the last remaining local portion of two very important early Texas roads. La Bahia Road (early 1700's) was an old Spanish military road that forked southwesterly from the Old San Antonio Road west of Nacogdoches, to Presidio La Bahia near Goliad. It was later a stagecoach road.
The Coushatta Trace was an extension of the Opelousas Road, an early immigrant road into Texas from Louisiana. it got its name from being a Coushatta Indian hunting trail. Used by early smugglers trying to avoid Spanish officials, the Coushatta Trace was called the "Contraband Road" in some early references. The upper fork merged with La Bahia Road northeast of present day Anderson. They ran together for several miles as one road, being part of Postal Route #1 after 1835.
During the Texas Revolution, this very road was used by settlers fleeing eastward from the Mexican Army, in what was later called the "Runaway Scrape".
From the HANDBOOK OF TEXAS ONLINE:
LA BAHÍA ROAD
The La Bahía, Opelousas, or Lower Road was originally an east-west Indian trail in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas and eventually extended to Washington-on-the-Brazos and Goliad. The Brazos River is thought to have been crossed at the mouth of the Navasota River in present Grimes County and the Colorado River near the site of present La Grange in Fayette County. The western portion of the road was laid out by the Spanish and was known as the Atascosito Road. The route was presumably known as early as 1690, when it was traveled by Alonso De León. It was known as the Opelousas Road during the nineteenth century, when it was used as a cattle trail.
Source: (
visit link)
UPPER COUSHATTA TRACE
The Upper Coushatta Trace was an alternate, wet-weather route of the Coushatta Trace. It branched off the latter in what is now eastern Grimes County and ran northward, while the main Coushatta Trace continued eastward en route to a Coushatta village on the east bank of the Sabine River. The Upper Coushatta Trace was used by a substantial number of Stephen F. Austin's colonists entering the future Grimes County to locate homesteads. After passing near the sites of Anderson, Shiro, and Roans Prairie, it turned eastward into what is now Walker County and proceeded across higher ground north of the headwaters of the San Jacinto River. It next passed through the southern part of the future Walker County and rejoined the principal trace at the Battise Village on the west bank of the Trinity River, at a site now in San Jacinto County. Surveyors' field notes for some of the land surveys in this area refer to this trail as the contraband or smugglers' road. The principal Coushatta Trace went across Montgomery County and provided the most direct route from Austin's colony on the Brazos River to the Battise Village. The disadvantage of this route, however, was that it went across the drainage basin of the San Jacinto River, which was difficult to traverse in wet weather. W. P. Zuber, a veteran of the battle of San Jacinto, wrote that his family lived near the Upper Coushatta Trace and used it in the Runaway Scrape in 1836.
Source: (
visit link)