Palmer, Edward Albert, Memorial Chapel and Autry House
a.k.a. Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church and Autry House
6221 and 6265 Main St., Houston, TXAutry House and the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel (now Palmer Episcopal Church) are distinguished examples of 1920s eclectic architecture. The architects-- Cram and Ferguson of Boston, William Ward Watkin and John F. Staub, both of Houston-- combined a variety of Italian precedents to create a handsome and serviceable group of buildings. Autry House and Palmer Chapel figured in the development of the South Main Street area of Houston in the 1920s as a district of important civic institutions, dispersed in a landscaped setting, and exhibiting a shared architectural disposition.
Autry House and the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel (now Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church) had their genesis in the concern of an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Harris Masterson, Jr. (1881-1935), for student life at the Rice Institute. In 1919 Father Masterson convinced the Episcopal Diocese of Texas to purchase a square block of land out of Hermann Park as the site for a student-oriented "community house." The property was located on Main Boulevard, along the South End street-car line be- tween Hermann Park and the Rice Institute campus.
In the fall of 1920, Masterson commissioned the Boston architects Cram and Ferguson to prepare a master plan for the development of the property. The architects projected a complex of four units: the community house, a collegiate chapel, a women's dormitory, and a rectory. The chapel and community house faced Main Boulevard, the other two units were set behind the first two, defining a series of linked garden courts. The chapel was designed in the Lombard Romanesque style. The other buildings corresponded in appearance to the units of the Residential Group for Men at the Rice Institute, which Cram and Ferguson had designed.
In 1921 Father Masterson and the Rev. Peter Gray Sears (1866-1942), rector of Christ Church in downtown Houston, prevailed upon Allie Kinsloe Autry to contribute $50,000 to build the community house as a memorial to her husband, James Lockhart Autry (1859-1920), a lawyer and former Navarro County judge who had presided over the discovery of oil at Corsicana in 1894. Autry subsequently joined Joseph Stephen Cullinan in founding the Texas Company of which he became general counsel.
Documents concerning the preparation of construction for Autry House and construction supervision were the responsibility of the Houston architect, William Ward Watkin. Watkin somewhat modified the design depicted in Cram and Ferguson's master plan rendering of 1920, probably to reduce costs. He eliminated the extensive use of brick as a wall-surfacing material, retaining it only in window sills and in the decorative framing of the secondary entrance bay. Arched windows were dispensed with almost entirely, and the use of colonnettes to separate grouped win-dows also apparently proved too expensive. However, Watkin retained the picturesque massing and distribution of openings, and the internal arrangement depicted in the Cram and Ferguson drawings. He even accorded increased importance to the double-volume common room (opening southward toward Hermann Park) and its sequence of associated spaces, the stage and chapel. Autry House was built in the summer and fall of 1921 and dedicated on November 6 by the Rt. Rev. George H. Kinsolving, Bishop of Texas, and the Rt. Rev. Clinton S. Quin, Bishop Coadjutor. The cost of the completed structure totaled approximately $41,500.
The chapel was the second, and only other, increment of the master plan to be built. In 1927 Daphne Palmer Neville, wife of the Houston cotton exporter Edwin L. Neville, donated $100,000 to the Episcopal Diocese of Texas to construct, outfit, and maintain a collegiate chapel for the students of the Rice Institute as a memorial to her brother, Edward Albert Palmer (1883-1908), who drowned attempting to save Mrs. Neville after she had fallen from a yacht on Clear Creek. William Ward Watkin was selected as the architect. In locating the chapel Watkin adhered to the Cram and Ferguson master plan of 1920, as well as to the general massing scheme it had envisioned. In developing the architecture, however, Watkin chose to simplify the earlier project greatly.
Watkin planned Palmer Chapel to comprise a single volume, a high nave terminating in a square-ended sanctuary devoid of the side aisles and polygonal projections shown in the Cram and Ferguson master plan. The building was finished in light-toned plaster, like Autry House, and it also obtained a red tile roof. Ornamental detail was of cast concrete finely executed by the Pyramid Stone Company (which employed one of Watkin's former draftsmen, A.B. Ellis) to resemble carved sandstone. Watkin's church represented a very abstract rendition of Italian Romanesque precedent, most visible in the composition and ornamentation of the bell tower.
The main portal on the west elevation was built with detail adapted from the work of Pietro Lombardo (c. 1435-1515), a major figure in the early Renaissance architecture of Venice. A specific Venetian source served as a precedent for the internal arrangement of the church--Lombardo's Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1480-1489). The framing system of the nave walls, the vaulted ceiling, and especially the high, raised chancel and sanctuary were excerpted from the Venetian church. According to tradition, Mrs. Neville admired the church and instructed Watkin to replicate it. In truth, however, he had prepared sketches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in 1908, while still an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania. Completed at a cost of approximately $55,000, Palmer Memorial Chapel was dedicated on March 27, 1927, by the Rt. Rev. George H. Kinsolving, Bishop of Texas, and the Rt. Rev. Clinton S. Quin, Bishop Coadjutor.
In 1928 Mr. and Mrs. Neville and a group of other South End residents who attended Christ Church petitioned Bishop Quin to establish a new parish at Palmer Chapel. Upon its institution in February of 1929, this new parish called Father Sears became the first rector of Palmer Memorial Church. Thereafter Palmer Chapel ceased to function primarily as a collegiate chapel for Rice, although it continued to be known commonly as Palmer Chapel through the 1930s. At the same time, a parish building committee was organized under the direction of Harry C. Wiess, cofounder and future president of the Humble 011 and Refining Company, to construct a parish house, designed by John F. Staub. This was completed in 1930, at a cost of approximately $108,000, on the part of the site designated in the master plan for the women's dormitory. Although Staub, like Watkin, did not adhere literally to the Cram and Ferguson master plan, he nonetheless retained its spirit. His L-shaped building continued the cloister system around two sides of an open green that overlooked Hermann Park. Through material, color, and detail he care- fully integrated his design with the existing chapel and achieved, in the principal (west) elevation of the parish house, a beautifully detailed Italian Romanesque portal.
The use of the Lombard Romanesque architectural style (as it was referred to at the time) was quite popular for church buildings during the 1920s. Cram and Ferguson employed it in a number of Roman Catholic churches that they designed during the 1920s, at the First Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Washington, and at the Conventual Church of St. Mary and St. Jude in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Houston, the Lombard Romanesque appeared frequently. J.W. Northrop, Jr., who had worked for Cram and Ferguson, used it at the First Evangelical Church (1927) on Holman Avenue and the First Congregational Church (1927) on South Main Street; and Maurice J. Sullivan used it in his masterwork, the Conventual Chapel of the Villa de Matel (1928) on Lawndale Avenue. Watkin returned to the neo-Romanesque style again at St.
Mark's Church (1942) in Beaumont and at the Central Church of Christ (1947) in Houston. Palmer Memorial Chapel was unusual, however, because of the incorporation of early Renaissance detail into the Romanesque-derived composition. In this regard, it is notable that Ralph Adams Cram, who detested Renaissance architecture, excepted Santa Maria dei Miracoli specifically from such condemnation.
Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), principal in the firm of Cram and Ferguson, was one of the foremost architects in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His firm was responsible for the campus plan of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, St. Thomas Church in New York, the Graduate College at Prince- ton University, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. In 1910 Cram prepared a general plan for the development of the Rice Institute campus in Houston and, between 1910 and 1916, designed the original campus buildings in an idiosyncratic and eclectic style combining references to the architecture of medieval Italy and Byzantium. Cram followed this approach to create a historically resonant architecture that would be appropriate for Houston.
William Ward Watkin (1886-1952) was sent to Houston in 1910 by Cram and Ferguson to supervise the construction of their buildings at the Rice Institute. Watkin was invited to remain at Rice, when it opened in 1912, to begin a course of instruction in architecture. In 1922 Watkin became Professor of Architecture and he remained head of the department of architecture until his death. From 1910 until 1919 Watkin acted as Cram and Ferguson's Houston representative, participating with them in the design and construction of the parish house at St. Mark's Church in Beaumont (1915) and Trinity Church, at Main Boulevard and Holman Avenue, Houston (1919; placed in National Register of Historic Places, 1983). Although Watkin's association with Cram and Ferguson ended in 1919, he subsequently collaborated with them on Autry House and on the design and construction of the Houston Public Library (1926; listed in National Register of Historic Places, 1977).
Watkin's independent commissions included the landscaping of the Houston sub-division of Courtlandt Place (1913; placed in National Register of Historic Places, 1980), where Judge and Mrs. Autry and Mr. and Mrs. Neville lived; planning and landscaping the Houston subdivision of Broadacres (1923; listed in National Register of Historic Places, 1980), where he designed a house for Brian Brewster Gilmer, a member of the first Vestry of Palmer Memorial Church; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1924, 1926); the campus plan and original buildings at Texas Tech University in Lubbock (1924, with Sanguinet, Staats, and Hedrick); Cohen House at Rice University (1927); and the chancel restoration and the Golding Chapel at Christ Church in Houston (1939; placed in National Register of Historic Places, 1979).
John Fanz Staub (1892-1981) was Houston's finest architect of the 1920s and 1930s. He came to Houston in 1921 to supervise the construction of three houses in Shadyside, a subdivision on Main Boulevard adjacent to the Rice campus, for the New York architect Harrie T. Lindeberg. Like Watkin, Staub was prevailed upon to remain in Houston by the occupants of two of these houses, William Stamps Farish, a cofounder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company and future chairman and president of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and Kenneth E. Womack, a cotton exporter.
Farish was a member of the original Vestry of Palmer Memorial Church, and Womack eventually served as Senior Warden of the vestry. Staub's first house in Houston was for another original vestryman, Palmer Hutcheson. This was located in Broadacres, where a third member of the original vestry, C. Milby Dow, had Staub design his house. For Harry C. Wiess, Staub designed the Stables (1931), the Humble Tower (1936, with Kenneth Franzheim), and alterations and additions to the Wiess House in Shadyside (1936). Staub's best-known building is Bayou Bend (1928, National Register of Historic Places, 1979) for Ima Hogg and her brother, Will C. Hogg, which now houses the decorative arts collection of The Museum of Fine Arts. Staub's nondomestic work includes the Bayou Club (1940) and the Chapel of the Christ Child (1952) at Christ Church, both in Houston.
Pompeo Coppini (1870-1957), who executed the portrait of Judge Autry, was the most prolific sculptor of monumental works of public art in Texas during the first half of the 20th century. Statues on the grounds of the Capitol in Austin and in the Hall of State at the Texas State Fair in Dallas were the work of Coppini. He was responsible for the Littlefield Memorial Fountain on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin and the Alamo Heroes Memorial in the Alamo Plaza in San Antonio. Coppini was born in Italy and trained in Florence. He came to the United States in 1896 and to San Antonio in 1901. Although Coppini died in San Antonio, he lived and worked for most of his career in New York.
Both Palmer Memorial Chapel and Autry House have undergone alterations and additions. During the thirty-year tenure of the second rector of Palmer Memorial Church, the Rev. Stanley L. Smith, elaborate polychromed wooden reredos and screens were installed in the sanctuary as gifts of Libbie Rice Farish, and the windows of the church were filled with leaded, antique, stained-glass windows given as memorials by various parishioners. Father Smith's successor, the Rev. Charles M. Wyatt-Brown, had the parish house remodeled in 1970 by the architect John Frazier. Between 1977 and 1979 the Libbie Rice and William Stamps Parish Hall were added to the south end of the east wing of the parish house, transforming it from an L shape to a U. Ken Harry and Associates were architects. This surrounded the Memorial Patio, a landscaped patio garden built in 1970-1971.
From 1929 until 1952 Autry House was administered by the rector of Palmer Memorial Church. During that time it functioned principally as a student center. Since 1952 it has been the seat of a diocesan chaplaincy ministering to the students and faculty of Rice University and the schools of the Texas Medical Center. To enable it to continue fulfilling this function, alterations, and additions were made between 1974 and 1976 by Howard Barnstone and Bailey and Belanger.
By expanding the architectural idiom that Cram had devised for the buildings of the Rice Institute, Autry House and the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel helped to give to their part of Houston a distinctive architectural character.
Local significance of the building:
Autry House and the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel (now Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church) had their genesis in the concern of an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Harris Masterson, Jr. (1881-1935), for student life at the Rice Institute. In 1919 Father Masterson convinced the Episcopal Diocese of Texas to purchase a square block of land out of Hermann Park as the site for a student-oriented "community house." The property was located on Main Boulevard, along the South End street-car line be- tween Hermann Park and the Rice Institute campus.
In the fall of 1920, Masterson commissioned the Boston architects Cram and Ferguson to prepare a master plan for the development of the property. The architects projected a complex of four units: the community house, a collegiate chapel, a women's dormitory, and a rectory. The chapel and community house faced Main Boulevard, the other two units were set behind the first two, defining a series of linked garden courts. The chapel was designed in the Lombard Romanesque style. The other buildings corresponded in appearance to the units of the Residential Group for Men at the Rice Institute, which Cram and Ferguson had designed.
In 1921 Father Masterson and the Rev. Peter Gray Sears (1866-1942), rector of Christ Church in downtown Houston, prevailed upon Allie Kinsloe Autry to contribute $50,000 to build the community house as a memorial to her husband, James Lockhart Autry (1859-1920), a lawyer and former Navarro County judge who had presided over the discovery of oil at Corsicana in 1894. Autry subsequently joined Joseph Stephen Cullinan in founding the Texas Company of which he became general counsel.
Documents concerning the preparation of construction for Autry House and construction supervision were the responsibility of the Houston architect, William Ward Watkin. Watkin somewhat modified the design depicted in Cram and Ferguson's master plan rendering of 1920, probably to reduce costs. He eliminated the extensive use of brick as a wall-surfacing material, retaining it only in window sills and in the decorative framing of the secondary entrance bay. Arched windows were dispensed with almost entirely, and the use of colonnettes to separate grouped win-dows also apparently proved too expensive. However, Watkin retained the picturesque massing and distribution of openings, and the internal arrangement depicted in the Cram and Ferguson drawings. He even accorded increased importance to the double-volume common room (opening southward toward Hermann Park) and its sequence of associated spaces, the stage and chapel. Autry House was built in the summer and fall of 1921 and dedicated on November 6 by the Rt. Rev. George H. Kinsolving, Bishop of Texas, and the Rt. Rev. Clinton S. Quin, Bishop Coadjutor. The cost of the completed structure totaled approximately $41,500.
The chapel was the second, and only other, increment of the master plan to be built. In 1927 Daphne Palmer Neville, wife of the Houston cotton exporter Edwin L. Neville, donated $100,000 to the Episcopal Diocese of Texas to construct, outfit, and maintain a collegiate chapel for the students of the Rice Institute as a memorial to her brother, Edward Albert Palmer (1883-1908), who drowned attempting to save Mrs. Neville after she had fallen from a yacht on Clear Creek. William Ward Watkin was selected as the architect. In locating the chapel Watkin adhered to the Cram and Ferguson master plan of 1920, as well as to the general massing scheme it had envisioned. In developing the architecture, however, Watkin chose to simplify the earlier project greatly.
Watkin planned Palmer Chapel to comprise a single volume, a high nave terminating in a square-ended sanctuary devoid of the side aisles and polygonal projections shown in the Cram and Ferguson master plan. The building was finished in light-toned plaster, like Autry House, and it also obtained a red tile roof. Ornamental detail was of cast concrete finely executed by the Pyramid Stone Company (which employed one of Watkin's former draftsmen, A.B. Ellis) to resemble carved sandstone. Watkin's church represented a very abstract rendition of Italian Romanesque precedent, most visible in the composition and ornamentation of the bell tower.
The main portal on the west elevation was built with detail adapted from the work of Pietro Lombardo (c. 1435-1515), a major figure in the early Renaissance architecture of Venice. A specific Venetian source served as a precedent for the internal arrangement of the church--Lombardo's Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1480-1489). The framing system of the nave walls, the vaulted ceiling, and especially the high, raised chancel and sanctuary were excerpted from the Venetian church. According to tradition, Mrs. Neville admired the church and instructed Watkin to replicate it. In truth, however, he had prepared sketches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in 1908, while still an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania. Completed at a cost of approximately $55,000, Palmer Memorial Chapel was dedicated on March 27, 1927, by the Rt. Rev. George H. Kinsolving, Bishop of Texas, and the Rt. Rev. Clinton S. Quin, Bishop Coadjutor.
In 1928 Mr. and Mrs. Neville and a group of other South End residents who attended Christ Church petitioned Bishop Quin to establish a new parish at Palmer Chapel. Upon its institution in February of 1929, this new parish called Father Sears became the first rector of Palmer Memorial Church. Thereafter Palmer Chapel ceased to function primarily as a collegiate chapel for Rice, although it continued to be known commonly as Palmer Chapel through the 1930s. At the same time, a parish building committee was organized under the direction of Harry C. Wiess, cofounder and future president of the Humble 011 and Refining Company, to construct a parish house, designed by John F. Staub. This was completed in 1930, at a cost of approximately $108,000, on the part of the site designated in the master plan for the women's dormitory. Although Staub, like Watkin, did not adhere literally to the Cram and Ferguson master plan, he nonetheless retained its spirit. His L-shaped building continued the cloister system around two sides of an open green that overlooked Hermann Park. Through material, color, and detail he care- fully integrated his design with the existing chapel and achieved, in the principal (west) elevation of the parish house, a beautifully detailed Italian Romanesque portal.
The use of the Lombard Romanesque architectural style (as it was referred to at the time) was quite popular for church buildings during the 1920s. Cram and Ferguson employed it in a number of Roman Catholic churches that they designed during the 1920s, at the First Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Washington, and at the Conventual Church of St. Mary and St. Jude in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Houston, the Lombard Romanesque appeared frequently. J.W. Northrop, Jr., who had worked for Cram and Ferguson, used it at the First Evangelical Church (1927) on Holman Avenue and the First Congregational Church (1927) on South Main Street; and Maurice J. Sullivan used it in his masterwork, the Conventual Chapel of the Villa de Matel (1928) on Lawndale Avenue. Watkin returned to the neo-Romanesque style again at St.
Mark's Church (1942) in Beaumont and at the Central Church of Christ (1947) in Houston. Palmer Memorial Chapel was unusual, however, because of the incorporation of early Renaissance detail into the Romanesque-derived composition. In this regard, it is notable that Ralph Adams Cram, who detested Renaissance architecture, excepted Santa Maria dei Miracoli specifically from such condemnation.
Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), principal in the firm of Cram and Ferguson, was one of the foremost architects in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His firm was responsible for the campus plan of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, St. Thomas Church in New York, the Graduate College at Prince- ton University, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. In 1910 Cram prepared a general plan for the development of the Rice Institute campus in Houston and, between 1910 and 1916, designed the original campus buildings in an idiosyncratic and eclectic style combining references to the architecture of medieval Italy and Byzantium. Cram followed this approach to create a historically resonant architecture that would be appropriate for Houston.
William Ward Watkin (1886-1952) was sent to Houston in 1910 by Cram and Ferguson to supervise the construction of their buildings at the Rice Institute. Watkin was invited to remain at Rice, when it opened in 1912, to begin a course of instruction in architecture. In 1922 Watkin became Professor of Architecture and he remained head of the department of architecture until his death. From 1910 until 1919 Watkin acted as Cram and Ferguson's Houston representative, participating with them in the design and construction of the parish house at St. Mark's Church in Beaumont (1915) and Trinity Church, at Main Boulevard and Holman Avenue, Houston (1919; placed in National Register of Historic Places, 1983). Although Watkin's association with Cram and Ferguson ended in 1919, he subsequently collaborated with them on Autry House and on the design and construction of the Houston Public Library (1926; listed in National Register of Historic Places, 1977).
Watkin's independent commissions included the landscaping of the Houston sub-division of Courtlandt Place (1913; placed in National Register of Historic Places, 1980), where Judge and Mrs. Autry and Mr. and Mrs. Neville lived; planning and landscaping the Houston subdivision of Broadacres (1923; listed in National Register of Historic Places, 1980), where he designed a house for Brian Brewster Gilmer, a member of the first Vestry of Palmer Memorial Church; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1924, 1926); the campus plan and original buildings at Texas Tech University in Lubbock (1924, with Sanguinet, Staats, and Hedrick); Cohen House at Rice University (1927); and the chancel restoration and the Golding Chapel at Christ Church in Houston (1939; placed in National Register of Historic Places, 1979).
John Fanz Staub (1892-1981) was Houston's finest architect of the 1920s and 1930s. He came to Houston in 1921 to supervise the construction of three houses in Shadyside, a subdivision on Main Boulevard adjacent to the Rice campus, for the New York architect Harrie T. Lindeberg. Like Watkin, Staub was prevailed upon to remain in Houston by the occupants of two of these houses, William Stamps Farish, a cofounder of the Humble Oil and Refining Company and future chairman and president of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and Kenneth E. Womack, a cotton exporter.
Farish was a member of the original Vestry of Palmer Memorial Church, and Womack eventually served as Senior Warden of the vestry. Staub's first house in Houston was for another original vestryman, Palmer Hutcheson. This was located in Broadacres, where a third member of the original vestry, C. Milby Dow, had Staub design his house. For Harry C. Wiess, Staub designed the Stables (1931), the Humble Tower (1936, with Kenneth Franzheim), and alterations and additions to the Wiess House in Shadyside (1936). Staub's best-known building is Bayou Bend (1928, National Register of Historic Places, 1979) for Ima Hogg and her brother, Will C. Hogg, which now houses the decorative arts collection of The Museum of Fine Arts. Staub's nondomestic work includes the Bayou Club (1940) and the Chapel of the Christ Child (1952) at Christ Church, both in Houston.
Pompeo Coppini (1870-1957), who executed the portrait of Judge Autry, was the most prolific sculptor of monumental works of public art in Texas during the first half of the 20th century. Statues on the grounds of the Capitol in Austin and in the Hall of State at the Texas State Fair in Dallas were the work of Coppini. He was responsible for the Littlefield Memorial Fountain on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin and the Alamo Heroes Memorial in the Alamo Plaza in San Antonio. Coppini was born in Italy and trained in Florence. He came to the United States in 1896 and to San Antonio in 1901. Although Coppini died in San Antonio, he lived and worked for most of his career in New York.
Both Palmer Memorial Chapel and Autry House have undergone alterations and additions. During the thirty-year tenure of the second rector of Palmer Memorial Church, the Rev. Stanley L. Smith, elaborate polychromed wooden reredos and screens were installed in the sanctuary as gifts of Libbie Rice Farish, and the windows of the church were filled with leaded, antique, stained-glass windows given as memorials by various parishioners. Father Smith's successor, the Rev. Charles M. Wyatt-Brown, had the parish house remodeled in 1970 by the architect John Frazier. Between 1977 and 1979 the Libbie Rice and William Stamps Parish Hall were added to the south end of the east wing of the parish house, transforming it from an L shape to a U. Ken Harry and Associates were architects. This surrounded the Memorial Patio, a landscaped patio garden built in 1970-1971.
From 1929 until 1952 Autry House was administered by the rector of Palmer Memorial Church. During that time it functioned principally as a student center. Since 1952 it has been the seat of a diocesan chaplaincy ministering to the students and faculty of Rice University and the schools of the Texas Medical Center. To enable it to continue fulfilling this function, alterations, and additions were made between 1974 and 1976 by Howard Barnstone and Bailey and Belanger.
By expanding the architectural idiom that Cram had devised for the buildings of the Rice Institute, Autry House and the Edward Albert Palmer Memorial Chapel helped to give to their part of Houston a distinctive architectural character.
Architecture
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
About National Register Listings
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.
The Battle of San Jacinto fought on April 21, 1836, was the decisive battle of the Texas Revolution, and led to the capture of Santa Anna and the end of the conflict.
About Harris County
Harris County Timeline
Harris County in Texas has a significant history that shaped its growth and importance. Established in 1837, the county was named after John Richardson Harris, founder of the first settlement, Harrisburg. Houston, the county seat, became a prominent commercial and shipping center due to its strategic location and railroads.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Harris County experienced rapid economic diversification and growth. The discovery of oil in the Spindletop field fueled Houston's emergence as an energy and petrochemical hub. Industries like cotton, lumber, shipping, and manufacturing thrived. NASA's Johnson Space Center further solidified the county's significance in space exploration and technology.
Harris County's demographic diversity is a defining aspect, attracting immigrants from various backgrounds. Houston became a cosmopolitan city with a vibrant culinary scene, dynamic arts community, and diverse festivals, reflecting its multicultural fabric.
Today, Harris County remains an influential economic and cultural center. Its strong economy spans energy, healthcare, technology, and international trade. The county houses renowned medical facilities and research institutions. Despite facing natural disasters, Harris County showcases resilience and implements measures to mitigate their impact.
With its rich history, economic vitality, multiculturalism, and ongoing growth, Harris County continues to shape Texas as a thriving hub of commerce, culture, and innovation.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Harris County experienced rapid economic diversification and growth. The discovery of oil in the Spindletop field fueled Houston's emergence as an energy and petrochemical hub. Industries like cotton, lumber, shipping, and manufacturing thrived. NASA's Johnson Space Center further solidified the county's significance in space exploration and technology.
Harris County's demographic diversity is a defining aspect, attracting immigrants from various backgrounds. Houston became a cosmopolitan city with a vibrant culinary scene, dynamic arts community, and diverse festivals, reflecting its multicultural fabric.
Today, Harris County remains an influential economic and cultural center. Its strong economy spans energy, healthcare, technology, and international trade. The county houses renowned medical facilities and research institutions. Despite facing natural disasters, Harris County showcases resilience and implements measures to mitigate their impact.
With its rich history, economic vitality, multiculturalism, and ongoing growth, Harris County continues to shape Texas as a thriving hub of commerce, culture, and innovation.
Harris County Timeline
This timeline provides a glimpse into the major events and milestones that have shaped the history of Harris County, Texas.
Pre-19th Century: The region was inhabited by various Native American tribes, including the Karankawa and Atakapa.
1822: Harrisburg, the county's first settlement, is founded by John Richardson Harris, a pioneer and one of the early Texas colonists.
1836: The Battle of San Jacinto, which secured Texas independence from Mexico, took place in present-day Harris County.
1837: Harris County is officially established and named after John Richardson Harris.
19th Century: Houston, the county seat and the largest city in Texas, experiences rapid growth due to its strategic location along Buffalo Bayou and the construction of railroads. The city becomes a major commercial and shipping hub, attracting industries such as cotton, lumber, and oil.
20th Century: The discovery of oil in the nearby Spindletop field and the subsequent growth of the oil industry greatly contribute to Harris County's economic development. Houston becomes an energy and petrochemical center.
1960s-1980s: The space industry plays a crucial role in Harris County's history with the establishment of NASA's Johnson Space Center, where mission control for the Apollo program is located.
Today: Harris County continues to be a thriving economic and cultural center. It is home to a diverse population, numerous industries, world-class medical facilities, and renowned cultural institutions.