Texas' struggle for independence from Mexico peaked with the fall of the Alamo in March 1836. As the Mexican Army swept across Texas, Sam Houston ordered colonists evacuated and cabins and buildings burned to avoid aiding the enemy. According to Alley family lore, he gave Abram Alley responsibility for moving the women and children of the Colorado River colony east to the Trinity River. The settlers, hurried and unprepared, faced harsh conditions, including death, in the flight known as the Runaway Scrape, which ended on April 21, 1836, when Sam Houston and the Texas Army defeated the Mexican Army at San Jacinto and won Texas' independence. Abram Alley built an oak log cabin in 1836 at the Atascosita Crossing of the Colorado River, eight miles southeast of Columbus; it is one of the few remaining and first built structures erected after the Runaway Scrape. Originally it had two rooms, measuring 16'x16' and 16'x18', and two fireplaces with sandstone chimneys. In the 1850s, paneled doors, a mantle and fireplace faces, and three additional rooms were added, and windows were added later to openings that were likely first closed with wooden boards. The cabin has a basic double-pen floor plan with two front doors, a mid-Atlantic style of the Cumberland variety, unlike the more common Texas double-pen forms known as dogtrot, saddlebag, or two P construction. The open central passage of the dogtrot style suited warm climates as a breezeway. Behind the cabin, an antique tool museum houses nineteenth-century farm and ranch tools from Colorado County in a building that was once a small store and later a bakery. The Alleys were of French Huguenot descent and migrated from Connecticut in the 1600s to Pennsylvania and then Missouri, where they worked lead mines owned by Moses Austin, father of Stephen F. Austin. Rawson Alley arrived in 1821 as surveyor of the Colorado River colony, his half-brothers John, Thomas, and Abram came to Texas in 1822, and William followed in 1824; by 1833, only William and Abram were still living.