Part 3

Part 3, Note 26

James O. Breeden, ed., A Long Ride in Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1994), p. 45; Matagorda Bulletin, May 1, 1839; Day, comp. and ed., Post Office Papers of the Republic of Texas 1836-1839, p. 64; [Houston] Morning Star, January 9, 1840, January 16, 1840, January 17, 1840, January 22, 1840; Colorado County Deed Records, Book B, pp. 300, 302, 304, 307, 309, 312; Austin City Gazette, May 6, 1840. The Republic of Texas generally established mail routes by legislation, but no act creating a route through Columbus was passed until February 6, 1840. However, as we have seen, in April 1836, Beeson's Crossing was included on one mail route. Probably very shortly afterward, since that place was nearly out of existence, the mail was informally diverted to the north to the incipient town of Columbus. Certainly by December 1837, the mail went through Columbus, and, a year later, Rezin Byrne, who was in fact a mail carrier, was apparently functioning as a postmaster in Columbus (see Day, comp. and ed., Post Office Papers of the Republic of Texas 1836-1839, pp. 37, 200; James M. Day, comp. and ed., Post Office Papers of the Republic of Texas 1839-1840, p. 20, Matagorda Bulletin, December 20, 1837).
There may have been a newspaper known as the Columbus Sentinel and Herald published in Columbus in 1839. On August 22 that year, the Colorado Gazette and Advertiser, which was published in Matagorda, quoted an item from a paper it identified as "the Columbus Sentinel and Herald of the 11th inst." Though there is serious doubt that a newspaper from Georgia could reach Matagorda in eleven days’ time, there was a paper called the Sentinel and Herald published in Columbus, Georgia between 1832 and 1841 which probably was the source of the item (see Thomas Streeter, Bibliography of Texas (1955. Reprint. Woodbridge, Connecticut: Research Publications, Inc., 1983), pp. 191-192 and John Melton Wallace, Gaceta to Gazette: A Check List of Texas Newspapers, 1813-1846 (Austin, 1966), p. 34).