Joseph Ehlinger

Ehlinger's life ran from Napoleon's Russia to Buffalo Bayou. His grandson told Louis Kemp in 1933 that Joseph had marched with Napoleon to Moscow and back, then worked in New Orleans as a cabinetmaker and carpenter, leaving his family in France, before riding to Texas in 1835. In 1840 he went back to Alsace for his wife, Mary, and their three children, and the family lived in Houston about five years. In 1845, returning from the house he was building on his Colorado County league, he drowned crossing Buffalo Bayou when his horse tangled in grapevines.

What the plaque says

Joseph Ehlinger Born in Alsace, France 1792; died in Houston, Texas 1845. Served in Captain William J. E. Heard's company at San Jacinto.

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

• George Allen — steps away
• John Kirby Allen — steps away
• John Viven — steps away
• John W. Moore — steps away