Central Square

Duane's take

The way the marker tells it, here's what happened on this piece of Texas ground. Back in 1825, a man named James Kerr was appointed to select and survey a capital for the Mexican land grant colony of Green DeWitt. That's a weighty assignment.

You're not just picking a spot on a map. You're deciding where a town begins. Where a story begins.

Kerr went to work, and when the dust settled, he had a name for the place: Gonzales, after Don Rafael Gonzales, who at the time was serving as governor of Coahuila and Texas. A man of some standing, clearly worth naming a capital after. And the town Kerr laid out was no small affair.

A 49-block square composed the inner town. Forty-nine blocks. That's a vision.

That's somebody saying, we are building something here that is meant to last. And right here, at the heart of all that planning and purpose, sat Central Square. The center of the center.

The marker doesn't dress it up any fancier than that, and it doesn't need to. Some squares earn their name the simple way. They're just, from the very beginning, exactly where everything starts.

What the marker says

James Kerr in 1825 was appointed to select and survey a capital for the Mexican land grant colony of Green DeWitt. Kerr named this Gonzales, for Don Rafael Gonzales, then governor of Coahuila and Texas. A 49-block square composed the inner town. This was Central Square.