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 and then a partner in H. and H. Canfield Company. Five years later he and John, who had joined him in New York in 1829, moved to Texas, eventually settling in Nacogdoches. With other speculators, the pair dealt in Mexican land titles. They began their Houston venture soon after Texas won its independence.
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 on the Gulf side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During these years he and a Briton developed what is thought to have been a successful shipping concern.
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