William Jones Elliott Heard, born in Tennessee in 1801 as the first of Stephen R. and Jemima M. Heard's nine children, moved to Alabama in the 1820s and married America Morton. He received a land certificate from Stephen F. Austin in 1830, and in 1832 settled here on 2,222 acres acquired from John C. Clark, one of Austin's Old 300 settlers. Because of the area's rich soil, early settlers named their town for the biblical Egypt, and Heard's property became known as Egypt Plantation. On April 21, 1836, about a month after Egypt Plantation narrowly escaped destruction by the advancing Mexican Army, Heard commanded Company F in Sam Houston's Army at the Battle of San Jacinto. After the war, he built a cotton gin at Egypt Plantation and raised cattle, cotton, corn, and sugar cane, registering his first cattle brand in 1837. In 1840 he joined Colonel John H. Moore in a campaign against Indians in the upper Colorado River area, and in 1846 he was elected Chief Justice of Wharton County. He died in 1874 and was buried in the Masonic Cemetery at Chappell Hill in Washington County. A red brick residence he built here in 1849-54 had housed six generations of his family by the early 1990s.