Enoch Brinson & Pecan Grove Plantation

The Handbook adds the colonist's early dealings and a traveler's sketch. Brinson took title to his sitio on August 7, 1824, and by October 1826 was protesting Dr. Johnson C. Hunter's surveying charges. By April 1827 he had bought part of his brother-in-law William Bloodgood's league, and the two disputed the line. His 1830 Texas Gazette notice also offered a house of private entertainment. In 1835 C. C. Cox found him a hospitable Baptist who had lost an eye. By 1850 the household held one person in slavery, whose name the plaque does not give.

What the plaque says

Enoch Brinson & Pecan Grove Plantation Enoch and Eliza (Ballew) Brinson traveled to Texas in 1824 with her father, Page Ballew, and her sister and brother-in-law, Levicy (Ballew) and William Bloodgood. The extended family were among Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists. The Brinsons settled on their league of land on a site overlooking San Jacinto Bay in August 1824 and erected a small cabin in which to live until the main house was completed. In 1830 Brinson advertised a blacksmith shop. During the Texas Revolution Brinson went to Galveston with Colonel James Morgan to defend the island and build fortifications. Brinson could not join the Texian army because of a disability, but he provided supplies and labor for the revolutionary cause. After his wife Eliza died, Brinson became involved with her widowed sister, Delilah Ballew Shaw. The couple obtained a marriage license in 1837 and married in 1838. In 1850, Brinson's plantation supported more than 640 head of cattle, four horses and thirty improved acres and the family kept one slave. The plantation property included outbuildings, the blacksmith shop and a family cemetery. By 1860, Brinson's personal worth was estimated to be $25,000 and his land was valued at seven thousand dollars. Enoch Brinson died in 1861. Delilah Brinson took charge of the estate, including the plantation, where she already was accustomed to milking 30 to 40 cows a day in addition to other duties. Later, she divided the Brinson land between their son and daughter, deeding Pecan Grove to their son. Delilah Brinson died in 1870. The land was divided many times in the next century, eventually becoming an industrial site. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 4.4 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Space Center Houston — 10 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• Emancipation Park — 19 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 — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Home of Mrs. Margaret McCormick — 2.5 mi
• New Washington — 2.9 mi
• Battle of San Jacinto — 2.9 mi
• Texas Army Attacked in Four Divisions — 2.9 mi