The townsite of Nuestra Senora Guadalupe de Jesus Victoria, founded in 1824 on the lower Guadalupe River, functioned from its inception as the administrative and commercial headquarters of the colonization grant led by empresario Martin De Leon, a Mexican-born rancher and one of the very few Tejano empresarios granted authority to settle families in Texas. De Leon brought roughly forty-one Mexican families to the site, and the town served as the organizing center for a colony built primarily around cattle ranching and agriculture on the coastal plain, with De Leon's own extensive herds and brand anchoring the local economy. As the colony's seat, the townsite hosted land distribution, local governance, and the coordination of ranching operations that distinguished it from the predominantly Anglo-American colonies elsewhere in Texas; De Leon's status as a Mexican citizen also gave the settlement a degree of legal standing in land disputes with neighboring American colonists. The De Leon family, including his wife Patricia de la Garza de Leon, remained prominent in the town's affairs after his death in an 1833 cholera epidemic. Today the site is the modern city of Victoria, Texas, seat of Victoria County, where De Leon Plaza in the historic downtown and several Texas historical markers commemorate the town's founding and its role as the headquarters of one of Mexican Texas's most significant colonization efforts.