Mier 1782 Padron

Every year, the parish priest of Mier would visit each household and conduct a census. After reviewing the town, he rode to each of the ranches in the Mier jurisdiction. The padron of 1782 was presumably the first conducted in Mier, approximately 30 years after the town's founding.

The census was conducted by Fr. Pedro Maldonado y Zapata, who recorded the route he took as he made his way among the households of the town and its outlying ranches, including the direction and distance traveled form the town square. He also noted the names of the owners of many of the ranches. This, along with the fact that many of the original grantees of the Mier porciones were still alive and some were living on their ranches, helped me to reconstruct the path that he took and the locations of the ranches on the porciones. As the map and census list shows, a substantial portion of the population of Mier in 1782 lived in what is now Texas.

Often, however, ranch families lived in clusters and did not necessarily reside on the land they owned. Instead they formed small villages for safety and companionship that persisted over the years and in some cases (such as Rancho Guardado and Rancho Arcabuz) correspond to present day settlements.

Please note that the location of most of the ranches is conjectural and based on an interpretation of their relative proximity to each other and to geographic features.

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By 1782 there were 28 ranches in the vicinity of Mier and over half of the population (56%) of the total population of 842 people lived on the ranches.

According the priest, 77% of the citizens were of Spanish descent (españoles), 18% were of mixed race (casta), and 4% were listed as indios. Mier did not have a mission, and except for one household headed by a man named Jose Cristobal Garza on the ranch called Miguel Perez, most of the indigenous people listed on the census were probably servants living in Spanish homes. It is known, however, that Native people lived independently in proximity to Mier, but these were likely excluded from the census.