Land Grants
The Texas General Land Office Land Grant Database, allows researchers to search by abstract number, name, class, title date, section number, patent number and more.
These records include files on individual tracts of land, records of land certificates, claims files, maps and many other useful sources of information about people and places in Texas.
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The Spanish Collection
The Spanish Collection of the Texas General Land Office Archives is a vast repository including approximately 4,200 land titles issued by Spain and Mexico from 1720 to
1836 covering 26 million acres. Associated documents such as registers
of families, field notes, character or admission certificates, official
correspondence, and empresario contracts round out the Collection.
The Spanish Collection is the primary source of documentation for land distribution in Texas prior to 1836 and serves as a rich source of information for studying the settlement of Texas and the activities in the empresario colonies prior to independence. Today these documents rest quietly in 138 neatly labeled and organized red Hollinger boxes housed in the comfort of the new humidity and temperature-controlled General Land Office records vault.
Republic and State Land
Grants The Land Office Archives also contains documents issued by the new Republic of Texas after winning independence from Mexico in 1836. Some of the most popular documents in the Archive relate to the land grant certificates issued to Texians who rendered military service in battle during the Texas Revolution, including William B. Travis, David Crockett and Sam Houston.
After annexation by the United States in 1845, Texas retained control of its public domain, unlike other western states, and continued to distribute its land. Prior to 1900, Texas was a cash poor state, and used land to secure and pay off debt, reward veterans, encourage economic development, finance public education and even in building the State Capitol.
The End of the Unappropriated Public Domain
In Hogue v. Baker, 1898, the Texas Supreme Court declared that there was no more vacant and
unappropriated land in Texas. As a result of the decision, a complete
audit was ordered by the Legislature. The audit determined that the
public school fund was short of the amount of land it should have had by
5,009,478 acres.
In 1900 an act was passed "to define the permanent school fund of the State of Texas, to partition the public lands between said fund and the State, and to adjust the account between said fund and said state; to set apart and appropriate to said school fund, the residue of the public domain..." Thus, all of the remaining unappropriated land was set aside by the legislature for the school fund.
Categories of Texas Land Grants
Kevin Klaus