Sixty seven feet of Sam Houston stands in the pines beside Interstate 45, on a granite pedestal ten feet high, and northbound drivers see him a long way off. The sculptor was David Adickes, born in Huntsville in 1927, who later became known for the row of oversized presidential heads off the same highway in Houston. He said the idea came from a visit to Mount Rushmore, where it struck him that Texas had nothing on that scale for its own people, and he put it to a planning meeting at Austin Hall convened for Sam Houston's bicentennial in 1993. He finished the statue in 1994 and called it A Tribute to Courage. It is not carved and it is not cast. The figure is a welded steel frame wrapped in steel mesh and built up in five layers of concrete, which is how something this size gets made at all, and the city puts its weight at about thirty tons. Houston commanded the Texan army at San Jacinto, served two terms as president of the Republic, and died in Huntsville in 1863. The statue is claimed as the tallest figure of an American hero in the world, a superlative that depends entirely on the word hero: Tulsa's Golden Driller and Our Lady of the Rockies in Montana are both taller. There is a visitor centre at its feet with a gift shop and picnic tables, and about fifty thousand people a year sign the book there. Adickes died in 2025, aged 98. The angle is better from the parking area than from the highway, because from the road you are looking up at the underside of a very large chin.
Getting there
30.6612, -95.5107
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