El Barrio del Alacrán

The plaque lists the Rusk Settlement among El Alacrán's helpers, and its roots were older than the barrio. A dozen Houston women led by Alice Graham Baker formed a settlement association in February 1907, and by 1909 it had rented the old Settegast Home at Gable and Maple, with a dispensary and a full-time nurse. In 1910 only fifty Second Ward residents gave Mexico as their birthplace. As the Revolution's refugees arrived, the settlement taught English to adults and children, sent attendance officers after absent pupils, formed all-Mexican Scout troops and offered free showers to families without running water.

What the plaque says

El Barrio del Alacrán Between 1910 and 1920, Houston attracted a large number of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans to the Second Ward where the Old Frost Town and Schrimpf's Field neighborhoods offered inexpensive housing for industrial workers. In the 1930s, the Spanish-speaking residents gave the area a new name - El Alacran, The Scorpion. Churches, the Rusk Settlement House, Rusk School and sports leagues provided social and educational services for the community. Urban renewal and highway construction in the 1950s demolished El Alacran. Once a notoriously impoverished neighborhood, El Alacran gave many residents a working start toward full integration into American society. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.3 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.
• Emancipation Park — 2.1 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.
• 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 3.2 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.

More markers nearby

• Frost Town — steps away
• Myers-Spalti Manufacturing Plant — 0.3 mi
• Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church — 0.4 mi
• Allen's Landing — 0.5 mi