Houston Heights

The townsite came from the John Austin grant, sold to I. W. Brashear in 1872, and stood sixty-two feet above sea level. Work began in 1892 on streets and alleys named for American colleges and universities, and in Houston's yellow fever epidemics many residents fled to the Heights. The 1890s brought a hotel later converted into the Texas Christian Sanitarium, an opera house, Clifford Grunewald's Houston Heights Polka of 1893 and, in the Spanish-American War, Camp Tom Ball on Heights Boulevard. A small Mexican community grew at Factory Village around the Oriental Textile Mills, where workers made camel-hair cloth.

What the plaque says

Houston Heights Representatives of the American Loan and Trust Company of Omaha, Nebraska, came to Houston in 1890 to scout locations for land development. Under the leadership of O. M. Carter, D. D. Cooley, and others, company directors purchased 1,756 acres of land northwest of Houston. They led efforts to electrify Houston's streetcar system in 1891 and extended the lines to their new community, named Houston Heights due to its elevation 23 feet above that of downtown Houston. Directors of the Omaha and South Texas Land Company, formed by American Loan and Trust n 1892, developed streets, sidewalks, and utility systems; built and marketed homes; and encouraged the establishment of business and industry in Houston Heights. The city of Houston Heights was incorporated in 1896, and W. G. Love served as first mayor. He was followed in that office by John A. Milroy, David Barker, Robert F. Isbell, and J. B. Marmion. Seeking a broader tax base with which to support their public schools, voters of Houston Heights agreed to annexation by the city of Houston in 1918. Houston Heights grew rapidly in the 20th century, but continued to maintain its unique identity. It remains a distinctive neighborhood with many historic structures. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 2.8 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 — 3.9 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 — 4.0 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 — 4.2 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 — 0.4 mi
• Daniel Denton Cooley — 0.5 mi
• Brown Chapel A. M. E. Church — 1.8 mi
• Mollie Bailey — 1.8 mi