From the Matagorda County History & Genealogy page
& Handbook of Texas Online
The proposed city of Portland (at the head of the raft on the Colorado River approximately 12 miles above the town of Matagorda) is an interesting account of one of the early promoters who came to Texas during Stephen F. Austin‘s era.
Born in Philadelphia in 1766, Nicholas Clopper, Sr., came to Texas in 1822, and was involved in many promotion schemes until his death in 1841.
His son, Nicholas Clopper, Jr., was one of the young men killed by Indians at the mouth of the Colorado River in the fall of 1822.
League No. 7 situated at the head of the raft was a sitio of land granted to Clopper by Stephen F. Austin Dec. 18, 1830, in exchange for the land he possessed at San Felipe.
Edward Nicholas Clopper, a great-grandson of Nicholas Clopper, Sr., tells the story of the proposed city of Portland in Matagorda County in his book, An American Family Through Eight Generations.
Quoting the story of this daring venture:
Nicholas had the proposed Portland City Company’s prospectus and constitution printed in March of 1841 in the form of a booklet of ten pages, and also stock certificates or “scrip” of denominations ranging from fifty dollars to eleven hundred dollars.
The scrip was to be sold and then accepted in payment for city lots. The company’s capital stock consisted of two thousand acres of land and the city lots - the upper half of Nicholas’s League No. 7 - and the tract was divided into twenty-two shares of $1,000 each.
The location of the proposed city was “at the head of the Raft, on the west bend of the Colorado River, where it is intended shall be a Cotton Press, and an extensive depot for cotton and other produce, which will be thence forwarded by railway to the head of tidewater on Wilson’s creek, distant three miles, and thence by steamboats or other craft to Port Austin and Palacios, where is good harbor and sufficient depth of water at all times for vessels of large class to freight for Europe or anywhere.”
E.R. Wightman, who surveyed land in Matagorda County under authority of the Mexican Government prior to the Revolution of 1836 and who acted as County Surveyor from the opening of the Land Office in 1838, declared that he was familiar with Nicholas Clopper’s League No. 7 and was aware that planters up the Rio Colorado had been demanding facilities for passing the Raft, which commences immediately below the proposed town of Portland, either by its removal or connection with Wilson’s Bayou three miles distant where eleven feet of water would be at the wharves; the men in Austin and Palacios (ports on Tres Palacios Bay) had an eye to this connection of Rio Colorado with Palacios; that the site of the proposed town was rolling, beautiful country for a great extent, with the rills of water stealing through wild peach, sweet bay, live oaks, and other trees, and was free from inundation; and that the town of Matagorda at the mouth of the Colorado would lose her commerce if this were effected - “and I am truly partial to Matagorda.”
The town was to be in the north-eastern corner of the league but like other projects of Nicholas’ it did not materialize.
It might have done so if he had lived longer; as it was his death put an end to it.
He sold at least five shares of stock in the enterprise; the purchasers of these five shares were William M. Corry, a lawyer, and Thomas F. Corry, of Cincinnati, and each was given a deed for one-twenty-second part of the upper half of the league for each share; as the plans were not carried out, these deeds were annulled in 1858 by Joseph’s [son of Nicholas Clopper] transfer of 1,500 acres on the north side of the half league to T. F. Corry.
The matter was finally disposed of, it appears many years later, for Joseph’s widow, Mary (Estes) Clopper, noted on one of the Manuscript copies of the Portland Constitution, “My son and myself sold this tract August 1877, for cash.”
Nicholas Clopper, Sr., died December 2, 1841, at the family home, “Beechwood,” in Pennsylvania.
A great-grandson, Edward Nicholas Clopper, summed up his life in these few words:
……he was a promoter who failed - an unsuccessful speculator with a strong religious bias.
He made a modest fortune as a merchant, lost it through speculation, and then spent the rest of his days speculating in efforts to recoup his losses.
He was a rover, too, possessed with the notion that beyond the horizon lay the promised land.
He accepted his reverses without complaint and kept firm his faith in his old-school Presbyterian god.