[Texas]:

$950 · Offered by William Reese Company

TEXAS ASSOCIATION. 8,000 SQUARE MILES ON THE TRINITY RIVER [caption title]. An uncompleted stock certificate for the Texas Association, otherwise known as the Mercer Colony, located roughly between the Brazos and Sabine rivers. The Texas Association was formed in early 1844 by Charles Fenton Mercer, a former agent for the Peters' Colony, which had obtained a large impresario grant to settle North Texas. Following a controversy between British and American stockholders in which the latter seized control of the project and reorganized it as the Texas Emigration and Land Company, Mercer sold his interest in the enterprise to Louisville-based investors and obtained a new and separate contract from the Republic of Texas. This agreement, made by President Sam Houston on Jan. 29, 1844, granted Mercer and the stockholders of the Texas Association eight thousand square miles on the Trinity River. In a colonization prospectus which he issued in September 1844 under the title of Texas Colonization (see Streeter 1520), Mercer offered, on payment of a surveying fee of eight dollars, up to half a section of land for every family settling on the grant before March 20, 1845. In order to finance his contract with Texas, Mercer "divided his whole interest in the said tract of land...into one-hundred shares" (Texas Colonization).Despite the fact that Mercer spent over $15,000 on his project, by September 1847 his plans had not progressed smoothly: "The work of colonization was impeded by the fa

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