Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church

The neighborhood was first part of the 1824 John Austin grant. S. P. Hollingsworth surveyed it into long narrow tracts running north from Buffalo Bayou in 1838, but Mayor William R. Baker, who by 1858 owned or held mortgages on most of it, filed the final plat in 1881. Baker also headed the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, and many of the craftsmen who worked in its shops built the one-story Greek Revival cottages that still line the streets. The city made the district the Sixth Ward in 1876, and Sabine Street keeps its brick paving.

What the plaque says

Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church Organized in 1881, this church was founded to serve people living in the West End and Chaneyville communities, later known as the Sixth Ward. The Rev. Louis Brown served as first pastor of the church, which was named in his honor. A small sanctuary built in 1882 was destroyed by fire in 1917. Construction of the present building, originally a one-story frame structure, was begun that year. It was later enlarged to two stories, and in 1944 the exterior was clad in brick. Brown Chapel continues to be an important part of the Sixth Ward. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.4 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.2 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.
• The Menil Collection — 2.2 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.5 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

• Caspar Braun — 0.4 mi
• Edwin Fairfax Gray — 0.5 mi
• Irvin Capers Lord — 0.5 mi
• St. Thomas High School — 1.0 mi