"Constitution" Bend

Congress approved this bend, then called Long Reach, as the terminus of a twenty-five-foot ship channel after 1897, but by 1909 the dredging had reached only 18.5 feet. Mayor Horace Baldwin Rice took the "Houston Plan" to Washington, offering to pay half the cost; the legislature let Harris County form a navigation district, voters approved $1,250,000 in bonds, and Jesse H. Jones arranged their sale. Dredging was finished on September 7, 1914. In 1919 the Merry Mount took the first cotton straight from Houston to a foreign market, and within a decade Houston led the nation in cotton exports.

What the plaque says

"Constitution" Bend Now Houston's famous ship-turning basin, this bend in Buffalo Bayou was named for the "Constitution," first steamboat to turn around here in June 1837. At the time, Houston was less than a year old. It was serving as temporary capital of the Republic of Texas, which was itself barely more than a year old. According to one story, the town's founders, John and Augustus Allen (brothers), paid the captain of the boat $1,000 to make the trip as a publicity measure. The trading vessel was approximately 150 x 24 x 8 feet in size, with one deck, no mast, a round stern, male figurehead, and a cabin on the deck. The "Constitution's" trip up Buffalo Bayou was not easy. Lines were run from it to trees and the boat was laboriously hauled forward by windlass. It ran aground twice. At one grounding, famous passenger Thomas Jefferson Chambers (patriot of the Republic) had enough time to visit a friend on shore. Upon their arrival at Houston, 35 of the 150 passengers memoralized the captain for his landmark voyage. The exit of the "Constitution" was no more graceful than her entrance: she had to back down the narrow bayou until she reached a spot wide enough to turn around. The name of this bend records that event. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 4.5 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 4.8 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 5.2 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 6.1 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.

More markers nearby

• Thomas H. Ball, Jr. — steps away
• Lorenzo de Zavala — 0.8 mi
• Site of General Offices, Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad — 1.9 mi
• Glendale Cemetery — 2.2 mi