  Augustus C. Allen John K. Allen The brothers Augustus C. and John K. Allen, the founders of Houston, were neither heroes of the Texas revolution—they did not fight in the Battle of San Jacinto or in any other—nor were they distinguished in other ways. They were land speculators, New Yorkers who came to Texas in the summer of 1832. Augustus had just turned thirty, John was twenty-six when they bought the land for Houston. Though the Allens’ town would become one of the leading cities of North America, though it would one day be abashed by a legend of riches, neither profited much for his pains. John Allen died in Houston two years after buying the land. Augustus lived until 1864, but he left Houston in 1850 after signing over to his wife Charlotte most of his remaining interests. Of this trio, only Charlotte was to profit from the Texas city conceived by New Yorkers. Living to a great age, she still owned Houston land when she died at her home, now the site of the Gulf Building, on August 3, 1895. Augustus Allen lived always on the verge of success. In poor health most of his life, he was early a bookworm, a taste which may have led to his first job, when he was seventeen, as a mathematics teacher in upstate New York. In 1827, when he was twenty-one, he moved to New York City, where he was first a bookkeeper The capitol of the Republic of Texas, 1837-39, now the site of the Rice Hotel. Little seems to be known of Augustus’ life during the fifteen years he lived in Houston. No doubt that owes less to mystery than to the prosaic nature of selling real estate. But some mystery does surround his separation from Charlotte in 1850. The land for Houston had been bought with money Mrs. Allen had inherited from her father, and in time she became dissatisfied with her husband’s management of the property. They separated but did not get a divorce, “both husband and wife pledging to keep the details of their troubles secret,” Amelia W. Williams has written. They seem to have succeeded. Ill, and surely once more disappointed in his luck, Augustus moved again, this time to Mexico, where he and the Mexican leader Benito Juarez became friends. In 1852 he was appointed United States consul for the Pacific port of Tehuantepec, and in 1858 he was also given the same post at the port of Minatitlan In 1864, apparently realizing that he was critically ill, he went to Washington to resign his consulships. There he died of pneumonia on June 11, less than a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. He died without ever returning to the city he and his brother conceived. Augustus was buried in Brooklyn; only one of the city’s founders, John Allen, is buried in Houston. The area now covered by Houston was first settled by Anglo-Americans before 1826, when a townsite was surveyed for John Richardson Harris, who named the place Harrisburg. An upstate New Yorker who was a member of Stephen F. Austin’s first Texas colony, Harris was granted a league of land—4,428 acres—at the junction of Buffalo and Brays Bayous. One of the first steam sawmills in Texas was built at Harrisburg in 1829, and by 1836 the hamlet also had perhaps twenty houses, most of which were log cabins. the Original Plan of Houston Harrisburg might have succeeded, and what was to become one of the principal American cities might have been called Harrisburg rather than Houston, but for at least two events besides the death of Harris in 1829. On April 16, 1836, Santa Anna, in hot pursuit of Sam Houston and the Texas army, rode into the almost deserted hamlet and burned it. The second event, the decision of those other upstate New Yorkers, the Allens, to start a town at the most interior point of The Allens and others had eyed the Harrisburg area with shrewd expectations. It was early seen that Buffalo Bayou would become important as an exit route for cotton and other crops grown in the rich agricultural lands along the Brazos River. The Allens first tried to buy the Harrisburg property. But its title was involved in fraudulent claims made against Harris’s estate and they chose a site a few miles farther up the bayou. On August 24 and 26, 1836, they bought the bulk of the John Austin survey, paying $5,000 for half a league and $1 an acre for a league. Thus the original townsite—6,642 acres south of Buffalo Bayou—cost the Allens $9,428. A Main Street corner a few blocks south of the original city was sold in 1940 for $1,150,000; seven years later, or 110 years after the Allens sold the first lots in Houston, Woolworth bought the corner for $3,050,000—or at the rate of $2000 a front inch. On September 30, 1836, the Allens advertised their nonexistent town in the Telegraph and Texas Register, saying Houston would become “beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” In October, when Houston was still but a prairie, John Allen made a proposal to the congress of the Republic of Texas, then meeting at Columbia. Move the government to Houston, he said, and the Allens would build a capitol for it. “Capitalists are interested in this town,” the brothers’ petition to congress said of the vacant land, and congress voted to move the government to Houston temporarily. The Allens, having made their town the capital of the republic before the town existed, began building in fact what had succeeded in fancy. They had already hired Gail and Thomas Borden, publishers of the Telegraph and Texas Register and also surveyors, to stake out the town. Gail, a notable figure in early Texas history, would later make his fortune by inventing a process for condensing milk. But the Bordens were busy in Columbia, where their newspaper was then published, and most of the surveying was done by Moses Lapham, a young Ohioan who worked for the Bordens. He began staking out the town early in October, 1836. When he finished seven weeks later, the Bordens announced in their newspaper, “We have at length, and almost without the use of mechanical instruments, completed a plan for the City of HOUSTON....” The historian Joe B. Frantz could find no record of what the Allens paid Lapham or the Bordens for surveying Houston. “From the extant record,” Frantz wrote, “it would appear that Lapham received only a bad case of chills, for which he drank ‘heavy draugts (sic) of black pepper and sassafras tea.’” Two years later, while surveying near San Antonio for Samuel Maverick, Lapham was scalped by Indians. Like one of the city’s founders, the man who laid out Houston is buried elsewhere, in San Antonio. The original city was laid out from Buffalo Bayou on the north to, but not including, Texas Avenue on the south, and on the west from the bend in the bayou behind the Music Hall to, but not including, Crawford Street on the east. The east-west streets were laid out roughly parallel with the bayou and thus do not lie on a true east-west line but are many degrees off the compass. Writing in 1958, Andrew Forest Muir showed that January 19, 1837, marks the beginning of Houston. “With the exception of one lot that had been sold on January 1, 1837, the first purchases were made on January 19, which is probably the most reasonable date to mark the beginning of the city of Houston as such,” he wrote. “Early in January, 1837, the town was so devoid of an existence that Francis Richard Lubbock with a party in a yawl passed the townsite without realizing it.” Neighbors: the First Methodist Church, completed in 1910, and the Texas National Bank Building, completed in 1955. Even in the beginning the property was astonishingly valuable, so much so that some land was sold in 12½ foot lots. Indeed, lots are said to have been sold for as much as $10,000, but Muir found nothing during the town’s first six months to substantiate that. Examining all the conveyances of record through June 20, 1837, he found only one lot that sold for $5,000 and another for $3,000. Most of them sold for no more than $500. But $500 was a considerable price for a small piece of virtually unimproved village land in 1837, even in a new republic’s temporary capital. The government moved to Houston in May, 1837, before the building to house it was finished, and the city was incorporated in June. Houston remained the capital of the republic until January, 1840, and it was again the capital, briefly, in 1842. Muddy and beset by recurring yellow fever epidemics, it grew slowly after the capital was removed to Austin. Looking south on Main Street in 1910, when the street still ended at Buffalo Bayou, from the point where the Main Street bridge now spans the bayou. One of the best early descriptions of Houston is that of Mary Austin Holley, who saw the town in December, 1837: “The Main street of this city of a year extends from the landing The early Houston seems to have been distinguished for its wickedness. In January, 1838, the diarist John Hunter Herndon called it “the greatest sink of disipation (sic) and vice that modern times have known.” After living in Houston two and a half months longer, he wrote. “What a den of villains must there not be here?” Francis C. Sheridan, a young Irishman in the British diplomatic service, saw Houston in 1840, when he wrote: “The most uncivilised place in Texas is I believe Houston the former Capital—I heard and read of more outrage and blackguardism in that town ... than throughout the whole of Texas.” However all that may have been, the early Houston shared one characteristic with the city of a century and a quarter later. Gustav Dresel, a young German who came to Texas in 1838, wrote in the autumn of 1839: “Nine months only had gone by since I had left Houston, but how different did it all look! I discovered more than twice the number of houses. Whole squares had been added, and I noticed new streets.” The population then numbered between two and three thousand. Early Houstonians had the good fortune to be spared the Indian raids and massacres that harassed some of frontier Texas. But Indians were no novelty in Houston. On March 18, 1838, Herndon wrote, “Many Indians in town who made much noise. A squaw drunk, the first I ever saw.” Muir has written, “To the best of the writer’s knowledge, there were never any Indian raids, battles or massacres in the Houston area during the time Anglo-Americans have lived here. Certainly there were Indians, however, for as late as 1846 a priest from St. Vincent’s [Roman Catholic] Church baptized a crowd of them.” The city grew slowly until the Civil War, when Houstonians voted overwhelmingly for the secession of Texas from the United States. During the war Houston was a lair for blockade runners, and on January 1, 1863, using two small vessels fortified with bales of cotton, it mounted a sea attack down Buffalo Bayou and helped recapture Galveston Island from Union forces that had seized the island three months earlier. In the same year Houston became the headquarters for the Confederate district of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The period of Reconstruction lasted from June 20, 1865, when Houston was occupied by Union troops, until January, 1874. The city’s growth between then and World War I owed first to its importance as a railroad center and then to the Texas oil boom. Each of four wars, and even a fifth catastrophe, served Houston well. Its beginnings arose from the Texans’ victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. Though its people suffered to some extent from the Civil War and much more from Reconstruction, Houston got an economic stimulus from the presence of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi headquarters. The city prospered during Reconstruction because many who abandoned the South moved to Texas. The greatest proportional growth of the city’s population, 111.4 per cent, came in the decade of the 1920s, largely a result of the impetus given by World War I. World War II led to the most successful period in Houston’s history. The city took a decisive lead in its long competition with Galveston after the Galveston flood and tidal wave of September 8, 1900, in which an estimated six thousand lives were lost and half the city was destroyed. The city’s most effective leaders in the first half of the twentieth century were Jesse H. Jones, a Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Four benefactors of indelible importance were William Marsh Rice, who endowed Rice University; George Henry Hermann, an eccentric who was born in Houston in 1843 and later gave the city a great hospital, Hermann Park, and Hermann Square downtown; and M. D. Anderson and Hugh Roy Cullen, the philanthropists. Houston’s good fortune during its first century and its extraordinary rise afterward have tempted some to call it a city of destiny. But the clichÉ signifies an irrevocable fate in spite of man’s successes or failures. And man, not fate, decisively controls the fortunes of cities. How is one city more or less than another? What is Houston compared with such whole or complete cities as Amsterdam and San Francisco? Only a prophet could say, for this hopelessly vigorous city is incomplete, unfinished; it cannot yet be judged as a whole city. Until then, Houstonians possess the rare excitement of living in a city during the springtime of what may become greatness, a city budding and shooting with the extravagance of nature’s annual renewal, a city in its feast years. Richard W. Dowling, Confederate Hero Mule-drawn streetcar, 1890 Piano van, 1917 The San Jacinto Monument A HOUSTON VADE MECUMHouston, an inland port city of southeastern Texas, on the Gulf Coastal Plain, is joined by the Houston Ship Channel with the Gulf of Mexico, fifty miles distant, at Galveston. The ship channel joins the Port of Houston with the Intracoastal Canal. Houston’s corporate limits of 349.4 square miles, including the 22 square miles of Lake Houston and a canal leading to it, surround fourteen of twenty-eight municipalities in its metropolitan area, Harris County, of which Houston is the county seat. The county’s total area is 1,747 square miles, of which the land area is 1,711 square miles. The city’s lowest altitude is 25 feet; the highest is 75 feet. The county’s altitude runs from close to sea level to 310 feet near Tomball, on the north. The annual normal rainfall is 45.3 inches. The annual average temperature is 70.0° F. The excess of births over deaths in the metropolitan area is around 24,000 a year, and each year around 21,000 more persons move to Houston than move away from it. Thus the metropolitan area’s population increases by an estimated 45,000 persons a year—a conservative figure. Of the 1,243,158 persons living in the metropolitan area at the time of the 1960 census, 634,522 were females and 608,636 were males, giving females a lead of 25,886. In 1960, 94.5 per cent of the population was urban, 5.5 per cent was rural. The density of population was 726.6 persons a square mile.
Work in ProgressCullen Center Domed Sports Stadium Manned Spacecraft Center Jetero Airport Natural Science Museum, Planetarium Five important Houston building projects, in various stages of development late in 1962, totaled a minimum completion cost of $347,500,000. Construction of a sixth, a new City Auditorium to be built on the site of the old one, which was opened in 1910, will begin in 1963 or 1964; money for the new auditorium was given by Houston Endowment, Inc., a foundation created by Jesse H. Jones. The eventual cost of Cullen Center, which is being built on a six-block site downtown, will be more than $100,000,000. The first two buildings, which were nearing completion late in 1962, are a twenty-five-story office building and the Hotel America. Cullen Center eventually will include an office building of fifty stories or more, two high-rise apartment towers, and other structures. The other projects, and their estimated final costs, are an air conditioned domed stadium for baseball and football games, $20,000,000; the Houston Intercontinental Airport, called Jetero, $125,000,000; the Manned Spacecraft Center, $100,000,000; and the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Planetarium, $2,500,000. |
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