Site of Carry Nation's Hotel
East Columbia, Brazoria County, Texas
Marker Inscription
During a brief and troubled time in her life, Carry Amelia Moore Nation (1846-1911) operated the "Old Columbia Hotel" on this site about 1880. She later achieved fame as a hatchet-wielding crusader against the use of alcoholic drink and tobacco. Born in Kentucky to slave-owning parents, Carry Moore and her family moved to Grayson County, Texas, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. After an unhappy first marriage in Missouri to an alcoholic, she married David Nation in 1877. They acquired 1,700 acres of farmland on the San Bernard River west of here. Unsuccessful at farming and marriage, David moved to Brazoria to practice law, and about 1880 Carry moved here to Columbia to operate the hotel owned by A. R. and Jesse W. Park. Her name is on the Columbia Methodist Church roll. She lived at the hotel with her daughter Charlien Gloyd, "Mother Gloyd" (Carry's first mother-in-law), and David's daughter Lola. David Nation also operated a saddle shop just southwest of this site. The family soon moved to Richmond, Texas, to operate a hotel, then moved to Kansas in 1889. The Nations were divorced in 1901 after Carry began her crusade against saloons. She lectured at the University of Texas in Austin in 1902 and 1904. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Long before she became a national symbol of the temperance movement, Carry Nation ran the Old Columbia Hotel on this spot around 1880, during an unsettled chapter of farming failures and a strained marriage in this corner of the Texas coastal plain. Only after moving on to Kansas at the end of the 1880s did she take up the hatchet and begin smashing saloons, turning private hardship with an alcoholic first husband into a very public crusade. The marker anchors that dramatic later fame to an ordinary boarding-house beginning in Brazoria County.
Why it matters
Carry Nation became one of the most recognizable faces of the prohibition and reform impulse that reshaped American law and daily life, and this quiet site reminds us that such crusaders begin as ordinary people shaped by ordinary struggles.
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Related people
- · Carry Amelia Moore Nation
- · David Nation
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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