Local Stories in Washington County
Texas·13 places
Military
Camp Felder
Camp Felder was a Confederate cavalry camp on New Year Creek land belonging to Gabriel Felder, who gave it his name, and it was in use as early as November 1863. The ground had previously been a Methodist camp meeting site. For about one month in the autumn of 1864 it was something else: a prison for Union soldiers.
History
Camptown Settlement
Camptown was Brenham's first Black neighbourhood, on ground east of the courthouse square. The earliest known reference to it is from 1850, when the brush along the creeks there sheltered runaway slaves, and freedpeople settled it in earnest after emancipation.
History
Captain McNelly's Grave
Leander H. McNelly is buried in a five acre Baptist burying ground off a farm road in Washington County, under a monument raised by public subscription among the citizens of South Texas. He was thirty three when he died of tuberculosis on the fourth of September 1877, and almost everything he is remembered for happened in the previous three years.
History
La Bahia's Turnverein
This hamlet is named after a Spanish road, and it was settled by Germans. The La Bahia Road was an east to west Indian trail long before anyone wrote it down, presumably known to Europeans as early as 1690, and later extended to Washington on the Brazos and to Goliad.
History
Little Rocky Creek
On 19 November 1854 Sam Houston was baptised in Little Rocky Creek by Rufus C. Burleson, the Baptist minister who was then president of Baylor University at Independence. Houston was sixty one, a sitting United States senator, and had spent most of his life conspicuously outside any church.
Education
Mission Institute
The Southern German Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church opened Mission Institute in Brenham on 28 March 1883, to train ministers for its own mission field. In 1889 it was renamed Blinn Memorial College for the Reverend Christian Blinn of New York, whose gift had built its main hall.
History
Old Baylor's Columns
The four stone columns standing on a hill at Independence are the most photographed thing Baylor University owns, and they are almost always captioned as the remains of Baylor University. That is half right in a way that matters. Baylor was chartered by the Congress of the Republic of Texas on 1 February 1845 and opened at Independence the following year.
Museums & Art
Texas Cotton Gin Museum
Thirteen farmers raised ten thousand dollars by selling two hundred shares at fifty dollars apiece, formed the Burton Farmers Gin Association in 1913, and built this gin the following year for eleven thousand eight hundred and thirty five dollars and ten cents, more than they had raised.
History
The Burning Of Brenham
On the night of 7 September 1866, federal occupation troops set fire to part of the commercial heart of Brenham, and nobody was ever convicted of it. The quarrel behind the fire had been running for weeks in print. D. L. McGary, editor of the Brenham Banner, had been attacking the local Freedmen's Bureau in his columns, and federal authorities arrested him for it.
History
The Flewellen Poll
The election held in Washington County on 2 November 1886 is known to historians as the Texas Election Outrage. The Handbook of Texas puts it plainly: ballot boxes from Black precincts were stolen, three Black leaders were lynched, and white Republican leaders were run out of the county.
History
The Houston-Lea Tomb
Margaret Moffette Lea married Sam Houston in 1840, when she was twenty one and he was forty seven, bore him eight children, and is generally credited with persuading him both to stop drinking and to be baptised. She outlived him by four years. He died at Huntsville in 1863 and was buried there.
History
The Lost Plat Map
The only known plat map of Washington-on-the-Brazos was destroyed in the Great Storm of 1900, which meant that for more than a century nobody knew with any precision where the vanished town's buildings had stood. The ground was preserved as a park, carrying a replica of Independence Hall and very little else identified on it.
History
The Railroad Bonus
Washington-on-the-Brazos was the county's first town, grown up at a ferry crossing on the Brazos in the 1820s and a real commercial centre by the mid 1830s. It is known as the place where the Texas Declaration of Independence was adopted on 2 March 1836 and signed the day after. Less often told is how it died, and it died of a decision its own citizens made.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
