Major John M. Allen

Tampico Allen, as Galveston called him, was a Kentucky sailor in the Greek cause who stood with Lord Byron at Missolonghi when Byron died in 1824. He escaped the 1835 Tampico expedition and served as acting major at San Jacinto. Elected mayor in 1839, he refused in 1840 to yield when the Galveston City Company pushed a new election under a changed franchise. He kept the city archives at home under two cannons until a court ruling and a posse ended the charter war. He died a United States marshal in an unmarked grave.

What the plaque says

Major John M. Allen San Jacinto veteran. First mayor of Galveston. Born in Kentucky. Died February 19, 1847

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Moody Mansion — 1.0 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 — 1.2 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.
• 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.
• Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm — 1.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Captain William S. Fisher — steps away
• James Love — steps away
• John Bankhead Magruder — steps away
• Warren D. C. Hall — steps away