Daniel Denton Cooley

Before Houston, Cooley worked in a mercantile business in Ashland, Nebraska, and was cashier of its First National Bank under Oscar Martin Carter, whose new land company he joined as director, treasurer and general manager. The American Loan and Trust Company bought 1,765 acres west of downtown Houston on May 5, 1891; the land stood twenty feet higher than downtown, and the venture was then one of the largest real estate projects in the country. Cooley's house was among the first, lit by wires run from the electric trolley. Marmion Park's pavilion is modeled on it.

What the plaque says

Daniel Denton Cooley (April 15, 1850 - November 22, 1933) A native of Binghampton, New York, D. D. Cooley moved to Omaha, Nebraska as a young man. In 1887 he joined the American Loan and Trust Company. The company bought a tract of land northwest of Houston in 1891 and sent Cooley and other representatives to oversee its development the following year. As general manager of the Omaha and South Texas Land Company, formed by American Loan and Trust in 1892, Cooley had direct input into the design of the Houston Heights community. Known later as the "Father of the Houston Heights," he laid out the main street, Heights Boulevard, and built his home here in 1892-93. He continued to promote real estate in the area after the company was dissolved about 1895. The first school in the neighborhood was named for Cooley, and he was a member of the school board. After Houston Heights was incorporated in 1896, he was elected an alderman. Cooley was a respected civic and business leader, whose interests included banking, insurance, railroads, real estate, and oil. Married to Helen Grace Winfield (1860-1916) in 1883, Cooley was the father of three sons. He died n 1933 and is buried in Glenwood Cemetery. The Cooley home was razed in 1965. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 3.3 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 — 4.5 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 — 4.5 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 — 4.7 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

• Heights Church of Christ — steps away
• Houston Heights — 0.5 mi
• Mollie Bailey — 2.0 mi
• Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church — 2.3 mi