About this tour
In the shadow of the glass towers, on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, sits a green pocket of the nineteenth century. Sam Houston Park was the first public park the city ever named, and when a group of preservation-minded citizens set out in the 1950s to save Houston's oldest surviving buildings from the wrecking ball, this is where they brought them. Today the park is an open-air museum of early Houston — a brick pioneer house, a Greek Revival home once owned by the city's founding philanthropist, the oldest dwelling in town, and other rescued structures gathered under the trees. This gentle loop walks among them, telling the story of the families who built frontier Houston and the citizens who later fought to keep their homes standing.