John Viven

This one-line tablet skips the twenty years between Viven's battle and his death. Louis Kemp's sketch says he enlisted in Captain Sidney Sherman's company in Kentucky on December 18, 1835, and reached Texas in January 1836. His San Jacinto donation certificate was lost, and a duplicate was issued in 1848. By March 1849 his name appears as a member of the Harris County Board of Land Commissioners on Styles J. Fowler's headright. He was a merchant when he died, his son Francis L. Viven administered the estate, and the heirs drew a duplicate bounty certificate in 1857.

What the plaque says

John Viven A member of Captain William Wood's company at San Jacinto. Died in Houston, October 26, 1856.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.5 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.5 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 — 1.7 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.
• Emancipation Park — 1.7 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.

More markers nearby

• Jethro Russell Bancroft — steps away
• Joseph Ehlinger — steps away
• George Allen — steps away
• John Kirby Allen — steps away