David Porter Richardson

Houston, TX

Rebecca Lamar was the widow of John Lamar and the mother of Mirabeau B. Lamar, a poet, soldier, and second president of the Republic of Texas. She died at "Oak Grove" in Houston in July 1839, in the earliest days of the young republic.

Houston, TX

This Houston burial ground is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, a designation reserved for graveyards that have served their communities for generations. Such early cemeteries hold the remains of the settlers, veterans, and civic founders who built the city in its formative decades.

Houston, TX

Augustus Chapman Allen was a New York-born schoolteacher and bookkeeper who came to Texas in the 1830s and threw in with the Texas Revolution, even funding a ship, the Brutus, to move troops and supplies. With his brother John Kirby Allen he bought marshy land along Buffalo Bayou after independence in 1836 and platted a brand-new town, naming it for the victorious general Sam Houston. When the young Republic's Congress accepted their offer and met there in 1837, a speculative real-estate gamble became a capital city.

Houston, TX

John Kirby Allen and his brother Augustus were New Yorkers who came to Texas and, just after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, chose a humid, weed-choked bend of Buffalo Bayou as the site of a future 'commercial emporium.' They bought more than 6,600 acres, named the town for Sam Houston, and advertised it across the country, and J. K. Allen was soon elected to the Texas Congress and worked to make Houston the Republic's capital. He died of fever at just 28, but the city he founded became the largest in Texas.