Original Site of The Steamboat House
Huntsville, Walker County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Dr. Rufus W. Bailey, a teacher, minister and attorney educated in New England, came to Huntsville as a language professor at Austin College in 1855. He acquired an eight-acre tract on this site and erected a house which he named "Buena Vista," but which became known as "The Steamboat House" because its unusual design evoked the image of a double-decker steamboat. According to local tradition Bailey gave the house to his son, but the younger Bailey and his wife did not care for the architecture and none of the family ever lived in the house. Dr. Rufus Bailey served as both minister of the Huntsville Presbyterian Church and president of Austin College from 1858 to 1862. In 1862 Bailey rented the house to General Sam Houston, who had been living at his farm in Chambers County since being removed from the Office of Governor of Texas for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Dr. Bailey died early in 1863, and his son, F. B. Bailey, inherited the house. General Houston died of pneumonia at the Steamboat House on July 26, 1863, and his funeral was held there the following day. Dr. Pleasant W. Kittrell, friend and physician to General Houston, bought the property in 1866. He died of yellow fever in the 1867 epidemic. In 1873 his widow, Mary Frances Goree Kittrell, traded the house to her brother, Major Thomas J. Goree, a local attorney and Confederate veteran, who made extensive renovations to give the house a Victorian appearance. The house was moved one-half mile from this site in 1927; it fell into disrepair. In 1936 it was moved to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum grounds and was presented to the state on March 2, Texas Independence Day. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The whimsical "Steamboat House" — built in the 1850s and named for its double-decker resemblance to a riverboat — is best remembered as the place where Sam Houston died. Removed from the governorship for refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy, the aging hero of Texas independence rented the house and died there of pneumonia in July 1863. The home passed through Bailey, Kittrell, and Goree hands before being moved in 1936 to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum grounds.
Why it matters
It marks the final chapter of Sam Houston, the founding giant of Texas, whose Unionist stand on the eve of the Civil War cost him his office but not his convictions.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, Huntsville was a young town in the piney woods of East Texas, still finding its footing barely a decade after Texas traded its status as an independent republic for statehood in 1845. It was a place of ambition and small colleges, where educated men from the older states arrived to plant institutions of learning on a raw frontier. Austin College, founded here in the 1850s, drew teachers and ministers who imagined the town as a seat of culture and refinement.
But the ground was shifting beneath all of it. By the winter of 1860–61 the sectional crisis that had been building for a generation broke open, and Texas joined the wave of Southern states voting to leave the Union. The question that split the nation — slavery, secession, and loyalty — arrived in Huntsville not as distant news but as a demand made of every prominent citizen, including the most famous Texan of them all.
Against that backdrop stood a peculiar house on an eight-acre tract, a home so oddly shaped that people stopped calling it by its given name. Built in an age of grand architectural experiment, it looked less like a Texas homestead than like a riverboat that had run aground far from any river.
People & events
The house began with Dr. Rufus W. Bailey, a New England–educated teacher, minister, and attorney who came to Huntsville in 1855 to profess languages at Austin College. He acquired the tract and raised a home he christened "Buena Vista." Its double-decker galleries so resembled a steamboat that the name never stuck; locals christened it the Steamboat House instead. In a story that has the ring of a true family anecdote, Bailey meant it as a gift for his son — but the younger Bailey and his wife found the design not to their taste, and by tradition no one in the family ever lived in it. Bailey himself served as both minister of the Huntsville Presbyterian Church and president of Austin College from 1858 to 1862.
In 1862 Bailey rented the empty house to a tenant whose name would outlast every other in the story: General Sam Houston. Houston had been removed from the governor's office for refusing to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, and had withdrawn to his farm before returning to Huntsville. He moved into the steamboat-shaped house as an old man out of step with his own state. There, on July 26, 1863, he died of pneumonia. His funeral was held in the house the very next day.
The home kept passing through caring hands. Dr. Pleasant W. Kittrell, Houston's friend and physician, bought it in 1866, only to die in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867. In 1873 his widow, Mary Frances Goree Kittrell, traded the house to her brother, Major Thomas J. Goree, an attorney and Confederate veteran who dressed it up in fashionable Victorian style. Moved off the site in 1927, it fell into disrepair, and in 1936 it was moved to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum grounds and given to the state on Texas Independence Day.
Its place in the American story
Sam Houston was not merely a Texas figure; he was a national one — a former governor of Tennessee, a general, a U.S. senator, and a president of the Republic of Texas before it entered the Union. His refusal to endorse secession made him one of the most prominent Southern Unionists of the era, a man who chose principle over office at enormous personal cost. That drama played out in countless forms across the divided nation, but few were as pointed as an aging founding father losing his governorship rather than betray his sense of the Union.
That this final chapter unfolded in a whimsical, out-of-place house gives the site a strange poignancy. The great figures of American history did not always end their lives in marble halls; sometimes they died in rented rooms, tended by friends, in towns far from the capitals where they had once held power. The Steamboat House preserves that human scale of history.
Its long journey — moved, neglected, rescued, and finally presented to the state on Texas Independence Day — also reflects how Americans decide, sometimes belatedly, which places are worth saving. A building nearly lost to disrepair became a treasured relic precisely because of the man who spent his last days inside it.
If you visit
Look first at the shape of the house itself. The reason for its nickname is meant to be read at a glance — the stacked galleries and vertical lines that made nineteenth-century neighbors think of a double-decker riverboat steaming past. Standing before it, you can understand why a name like "Buena Vista" never had a chance against so vivid an image.
Remember, too, that the house you see has traveled and changed. It was moved more than once and remade in Victorian fashion by a later owner, so you are looking at layers of history, not a single frozen moment. Let that settle the imagination: this is a survivor, carried across decades and half-miles to reach the spot where it now rests among other memorials to the general.
This marker sits in Huntsville, a town that wears its Sam Houston connections openly, so the Steamboat House fits naturally into a slower half-day of walking and looking rather than a quick photo stop. Give yourself a quiet minute here. You are standing where one of the towering figures of the American nineteenth century, stubborn to the end, drew his last breath in a house shaped like a boat that never sailed.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Sam Houston
- · Rufus W. Bailey
- · Pleasant W. Kittrell
- · Thomas J. Goree
Related events
- · Death of Sam Houston (1863)
Themes & tags
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