Gail Borden, Jr.

In Galveston, Borden was first collector of the port under the Republic, serving from 1837 until Lamar removed him in 1838, and again from 1841 to 1843. From 1839 to 1851 he was agent for the Galveston City Company and helped sell some 2,500 lots. He invented a bathhouse on wheels for women who wanted to enter the Gulf, served as a Baptist deacon and an officer of the temperance society. In 1849 he perfected a meat biscuit and moved to New York in 1851 to sell it. The Handbook of Texas dates his milk-condensing patents to 1856.

What the plaque says

Gail Borden, Jr. Site of the home 1837-1851, of Gail Borden, Jr. pioneer surveyor, newspaper editor and inventor of a process for condensing milk, which he discovered while living here in 1840. Born November 9, 1801. Died September 2, 1874.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Moody Mansion — 0.8 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 1.0 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.
• Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm — 1.3 mi
  The concrete wall along the Gulf that Galveston built after the hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people in a city of 38,000.
• The Strand — 1.4 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.

More markers nearby

• Samuel May Williams — steps away
• The Mexican Telegraph Company_The Zimmermann Telegram — steps away
• Site of the Home of Michael Branaman Menard — steps away
• Galveston Artillery Club — 0.3 mi