Frost Town

The plaque ends with the houses lost to the Elysian Viaduct; rebuilding that viaduct brought Frost Town back. In the summers of 2016 and 2018, archaeologists working for TxDOT and Houston Archeological Society volunteers dug James Bute Park. They found brick piers, cisterns, pet burials and more than 150,000 artifacts. German households had edged their yards with upturned bottles, one an 1870s Budweiser. One cistern bears its mason's signature, the only signed cistern reported in Texas. A 1940s Todd shipyard badge was traced to ship-fitter Pedro Ambriz, from the years Mexican residents called the place El Barrio del Alacrán.

What the plaque says

Frost Town The Frost Town community developed on the property of Jonathan Benson Frost, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence. After the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, Frost returned to his Tennessee home and brought his family to Texas, establishing a blacksmith shop and homestead about one mile east of the new city of Houston. He died from cholera in 1837, and in 1838, his brothers, Samuel Miles Frost and James Coleman Frost, subdivided his property, creating one of Houston's earliest additions, which remained in residential use until the early 1990s. German immigrants soon settled here, and by the 1850s, Frost Town was a thriving community which reflected its residents' cultural heritage. Several prominent Houston-area german families lived in the settlement. Others in the area included Irish immigrants and employees of the Galveston, Houston & Henderson Railroad, which reached the area in 1853. By the 1870s, Frost Town was a community in transition. Area railroads had contributed to industrial development between Houston and Frost Town, and freedmen moved into the community, which was now considered part of Houston's Second Ward. By the early 20th century, unskilled workers began to move into Frost Town, which was now connected to industries on the north side of Buffalo Bayou by a steel truss swing bridge built in 1904. Mexican residents began to move into Frost Town, while Anglo-European residents left, further shifting the community's demographics. Between 1930 and 1950, Frost Town became increasingly isolated because of industrial development. Residents began relocating following World War II, when the Elysian Viaduct and U.S. Highway 59 were constructed through the area, eliminating Frost Town's residential buildings. Today, James Bute Park marks the former community, which existed for more than 100 years. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.2 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 — 3.3 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

• El Barrio del Alacrán — steps away
• Myers-Spalti Manufacturing Plant — 0.4 mi
• Allen's Landing — 0.4 mi
• Harris County — 0.5 mi