DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do my best to do it justice. Now, you want to talk about a man who earned his place on the map — literally — pull up a chair, because William Rabb's story has got grit in it. And I mean that in more ways than one.
William Rabb was born in 1770, a prosperous miller out of Pennsylvania, and when Stephen F. Austin started putting together his first colony in Texas, Rabb was already ahead of the game. He hadn't just heard about Texas — he'd already been there.
Back in 1819, he made an exploratory trip and picked out his spot: the east side of the Colorado River. That's a man who does his homework. By 1821, Rabb came to Texas proper, bringing members of his family along with him.
And what he received for joining Austin's first colony was no small thing — one of the earliest and largest land grants on record, more than 22,000 acres. Of that, 13,285 acres made up what we now call Rabb's Prairie, right here in Fayette County. But here's the part of the deal that separates William Rabb from a man who just wanted land.
Part of his agreement with Austin was to build a grist mill for the future settlers of the colony. Not for himself. For the people who'd be comin' after.
That's a commitment. Now, a grist mill is only as good as its grinding stones, and Rabb wasn't about to cut corners. Those stones — two of them, weighing about one ton each — were imported all the way from Scotland.
Scotland. They crossed an ocean, got unloaded at the mouth of the Colorado River on the Gulf of Mexico, and then sat there presenting a rather spectacular problem: how do you move two one-ton stones roughly a hundred miles inland to the mill site? Most men might've stared at that problem for a good long while.
William Rabb built a solution. He constructed a wooden axle, attached one of those round stones to each end to serve as wheels — using the very things he needed to move as the means to move them — then hitched his oxen to that contraption and pulled it a hundred miles through Texas in 1831. He made it.
And then, shortly afterward, William Rabb died. Born 1770, gone 1831. He got those stones where they needed to go, and that was that.
Through the years, his descendants carried on — playing significant roles in the development of Texas, the marker tells us. The community of Rabb's Prairie was named for this pioneer family, and this portion of Fayette County still carries William Rabb's name. A miller from Pennsylvania who crossed an ocean's worth of paperwork, imported grinding stones from Scotland, rigged up one of the more creative transport solutions in early Texas history, and died having kept his word.
That's the kind of man a prairie gets named after.
What the marker says
This portion of Fayette County is named for William Rabb (1770-1831), a prosperous miller from Pennsylvania who came to Texas in 1821 with members of his family. Rabb claimed a site on the east side of the Colorado River he had selected during an exploratory trip in 1819. He was a member of Stephen F. Austin's first colony in Texas, and recipient of one the earliest and largest land grants of more than 22,000 acres, of which 13,285 acres comprised Rabb's Prairie. Part of Rabb's agreement with Austin was to build a grist mill for future settlers of the colony. Two grinding stones for the mill weighing about one ton each were imported from Scotland and unloaded at the mouth of the Colorado River on the Gulf of Mexico. In order to transport the heavy stones to the site of the grist mill, Rabb constructed a wooden axle and attached a round stone on both ends to serve as wheels. He then hitched oxen to the vehicle and pulled it about 100 miles in 1831; Rabb died shortly afterward. Through the years his descendants played significant roles in the development of Texas. The community of Rabb's Prairie was named for this pioneer family. (1996)