Bellaire

Baldwin, an Iowan, was nationally known as vice president of the Burlington Railroad, and although the advertising credited the Gulf breezes he may have named the town for Bellaire, Ohio, on his railroad. By 1910 he had put more than $150,000 into turning the treeless prairie into house lots and truck farms. His Westmoreland Railroad Company ran an electric streetcar, the "Toonerville Trolley," down Bellaire Boulevard from December 12, 1910, until buses replaced it in 1927. He persuaded the horticulturist Edward Teas to move his nursery from Missouri to the boulevard, and a post office opened in 1911.

What the plaque says

Bellaire William Wright Baldwin, president of the South End Land Company, founded Bellaire in 1908 on part of the 9,449-acre ranch once owned by William Marsh Rice, benefactor of Rice Institute (now Rice University). Baldwin surveyed the eastern 1,000 acres of the ranch into small truck farms, which he named Westmoreland Farms. He platted Bellaire in the middle of the farms to serve as an exclusive residential neighborhood and agricultural trading center. The project was separated from Houston by approximately six miles of prairie. South End Land Company advertisements, targeted to Midwestern farmers, noted that Bellaire ("Good Air") was named for the area's gulf breezes. The original townsite was bounded by Palmetto, First, Jessamine, and Sixth (now Ferris) streets. Bellaire Boulevard and an electric streetcar line connected Bellaire to Houston. The town was incorporated in 1918, and C. P. Younts served as first mayor. The post-war building boom in the late 1940s and early 1950s resulted in rapid population growth. Completely surrounded by the expanding city of Houston by 1949, Bellaire nevertheless retained its independence and its own city government. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 4.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 4.9 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 4.9 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 5.8 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Bellaire Streetcar Line — steps away
• The Kinkaid School — 4.1 mi
• San Jacinto Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas — 4.5 mi
• Bayou Bend — 4.7 mi