Pillar Street

Pillar Street. El Calle de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. Mary the Mother of Jesus miraculously appeared to the Apostle James in 40 A.D. in Zaragoza, Spain. She gave James a small statue of herself standing on a pillar of jasper. The statue on the pillar became the center of Zaragoza's Shrine of Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Our Lady of the Pillar. , The Marques de Aguayo, the third governor of Texas (1721-1722), chose Our Lady of the Pillar as his guide and protector. He established the first capital of Texas at the Adaes Caddo village, near present-day Robeline, Louisiana. Aguayo named the Texas capital Our Lady of the Pillar at Adaes. , In 1773 the Spanish settlers at Adaes were forcibly moved to San Antonio. A year later, Antonio Gil Y’Barbo brought them back to East Texas on the Trinity River. The Adaesaños named their Trinity River settlement Our Lady of the Pillar of Bucareli, after the viceroy of New Spain., Troubled by Comanches, sickness, and floods, in 1779 Y'Barbo and his people left Bucareli and moved east among the peaceful Nacogdoches Caddos. Y'Barbo named their new settlement Our Lady of the Pillar at Nacogdoches, which became the City of Nacogdoches., Y'Barbo proceeded to lay out Nacogdoches around the traditional Plaza Principal. The main street that lay on the south side of the Plaza became El Calle de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, the street of Our Lady of the Pillar, now called Pillar Street., Pillar Street played its part in Texas history. In 1835 the New Orleans Greys, on their way to the Alamo and Goliad, bivouacked and banqueted in Adolphus Sterne's peach orchard on Pillar Street. Sam Houston gave his young friend, Eugenia Sterne, a birthday present of a city lot on Pillar Street. Mexican Colonel Piedras's "Red House" was on the corner of Pillar and South Street, and the Nacogdoches County courthouse was on the square on Pillar., And Calle Pilar, or Pillar Street, held the homes of some of Nacogdoches' own Texas heroes - President Sam Houston, Secretary of War Thomas J. Rusk, Commissary General John Forbes, and John S. Roberts, Quartermaster of the Texas Militia and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.