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 year-round navigation in Texas, joined with the first to overcome Harrisburg’s ambitions.
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.”
