Joshua Houston, born into slavery and held by Sam and Margaret Houston, became a prominent Huntsville businessman and public official after the Civil War. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery, the same cemetery as Sam Houston. Born about 1822 on Temple Lea's plantation in Perry County, Alabama, he passed to Lea's daughter Margaret when her father died in 1834, and came to Texas with her in 1840, the year she married Sam Houston. He became a skilled blacksmith, wheelwright and stage driver, and from the 1850s Sam Houston let him work for a stagecoach company and keep part of his earnings. By family tradition, Sam Houston told the people he held in the fall of 1862 that they were free, though freeing slaves was then illegal in Texas, and they were still listed in his estate when he died.
After Houston's death in July 1863, Joshua is reported to have offered Margaret Lea Houston his life savings of $2,000 in gold; she told him to use it to educate his children. On January 15, 1866, he bought land in Huntsville, where he opened a blacksmith shop and built a two-story house.
He was a trustee in 1867 of Union Church, the first Black church in Huntsville, which also served as a school, and a deacon of the First Baptist Church established in 1869. He served as a city alderman in 1867 and 1870, was elected Walker County commissioner in 1878 and 1882, and went to the Republican National Convention as a delegate. He promoted Bishop Ward Normal and Collegiate Institute, founded in Huntsville in 1883. He married three times and had eight children, among them Samuel Walker Houston, and died on January 8, 1902.
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30.7268, -95.5462
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