The Allen Brothers' Ad

Houston began as advertising copy. In August 1836, four months after the battle of San Jacinto, two brothers from New York, Augustus and John Kirby Allen, bought three quarters of an old Mexican land grant on Buffalo Bayou in two deeds two days apart, some six thousand six hundred acres for around nine thousand dollars, and by the end of the month were advertising a town that did not exist. The copy called the site handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well watered, in the very heart of population, a place that must ever command the trade of the largest and richest portion of Texas. It was a prospectus written in the future tense. The ground is flat alluvial plain, there are no springs, and the settlement so described consisted, on the first day of 1837, of one log cabin and twelve residents. The health claim was the worst of it: yellow fever came through again and again, and in 1839 it killed something like an eighth of the town. One line, though, was exactly true, and everything since has rested on it. The site sat at the head of navigation on Buffalo Bayou, the furthest inland a boat could reach, which is why Houston exists and Harrisburg does not. Within four months the town held fifteen hundred people and a hundred houses, helped along by the brothers naming their paper city for Sam Houston and, with John Kirby Allen sitting in the First Congress himself, securing it as the republic's capital from 1837. The bank where they landed is a city park now, called Allen's Landing.