Jane Long Boarding House

Jane Long had received this land in 1824, and she sold part of the league to Robert E. Handy, who laid out Richmond on it. Besides the boarding house she built up a plantation two miles south of town, buying and selling land, raising cattle and growing cotton with enslaved labor: twelve people in 1840 and nineteen, valued at $13,300, by 1861, when she held about 2,000 acres. After emancipation she worked the land with tenants and briefly tried sheep. In 1870 she lived alone, next door to her daughter Ann, who died that June.

What the plaque says

Jane Long Boarding House Born in Maryland in 1798, Jane H. Wilkinson moved to Mississippi (1811) and became the ward of her famous relative, Gen. James Wilkinson, field commander of the United States Army. Jane married Dr. James Long in 1815 and later followed him on a filibustering expedition to free Texas from Spain. In 1821 Long led his forces into battle, leaving Jane alone with their daughter Ann and slave girl Kian at Point Bolivar, near Galveston. On Dec. 21, 1821, with snow falling, their food supply gone, and Kian ill, Jane gave birth to a daughter, then rose and got food and firewood for her family. Her heroism earned her the name "Mother of Texas." Later she learned of her husband's death in Mexico. During the period Texas was a colony and a republic, Jane Long operated two well-known boarding houses. She started the first in Brazoria in 1832; her guests included William B. Travis, Sam Houston, and Mirabeau B. Lamar. In 1837 Jane moved to Richmond and on this site opened another boarding house which became a center for social and political activities as well as lodging for prominent Texans and European visitors. Jane ran this hotel until her plantation near town became prosperous in the 1840s. She died in 1880 and is buried in richmond's Morton Cemetery. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazos Bend State Park — 17 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• The Menil Collection — 24 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 24 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 24 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

• Early Courthouse Square — steps away
• Morton Lodge No. 72, A. F. & A. M. — steps away
• Constantine W. Buckley — steps away
• Site of the Home of Randal Jones — steps away