Allen's Landing & the Founding of Houston

Houston did not grow up around a fort or a mission or a courthouse — it grew up around a sales pitch. In August 1836, just months after Texas won its independence, two land-speculating brothers from New York, Augustus and John Kirby Allen, bought thousands of acres of soggy prairie where Buffalo Bayou meets White Oak Bayou, named the place for the hero of San Jacinto, and ran a newspaper ad promising a 'great interior commercial emporium.' Most of what they promised was still mud and mosquitoes, but the gamble worked: they talked the new Republic's Congress into making Houston the temporary capital, the steamboats started coming up the bayou, and a city took root almost out of thin air. This short walk traces that beginning — from the riverbank wharf where Houston's first ships tied up, through the market square the Allens laid out for trade, past the bakery and cotton offices that fed the boomtown, to the spot where the Republic's presidents once lived. Keep an eye on the bayou below the bluff; that brown, winding water is the whole reason any of this is here.