In 1821, Stephen F. Austin received a permit from the Mexican government to act as empresario for 300 families to settle in Texas, and that summer he and the Old Three Hundred began crossing into Texas. From 1823 to 1824, Austin and Felipe Enrique Neri, Baron de Bastrop, issued 272 land grants, including 56 along the Brazos and San Bernard Rivers in what became Fort Bend County in 1837. On August 3, 1824, David Randon and his business partner Isaac Pennington received a 4,428-acre grant on the Brazos River between the John Foster League and the Churchill Fulshear League. The land offered fertile soil and valuable river access for transporting crops to market. Randon, a native of Alabama and part Creek Indian, came to Texas seeking opportunity, received the grant as a single man, and by March 1826 was recorded as having a wife, Nancy McNeel, daughter of Brazoria County land grantee John McNeel. He became one of the most successful planters in Austin’s colony, died in 1867, and was buried on the Dyer Moore ranch near Orchard. Pennington, a native of Virginia, sold his interest in the land to Randon, was listed as a teacher as early as 1823-24, making him one of the colony’s earliest teachers, and later served as mail contractor on the route between Independence and Milam in 1836. The Randon and Pennington grant became an important part of the early development of Texas and Fort Bend County.