Moses W. Brigham

Probate papers tell a harder story than the tablet's quiet death date. Louis Kemp's sketch says Brigham and Mandred Wood were attacked in Houston in January 1838 by David J. Jones and John C. C. Quick, and a doctor's bill charged to his estate suggests he lingered before he died. The inventory shows he kept a small store with a bar. His widow, Margaret, still living in Austin in 1883, received a veterans' donation of 1,280 acres. Kemp also noted that the state's 1936 monument at first gave his death year, by mistake, as 1854.

What the plaque says

Moses W. Brigham A member of Captain Amasa Turner's company at Battle of San Jacinto. Died in Houston January 20, 1838.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• William S. Stilwell — steps away
• John Cheevers — steps away
• William Daniel Durham — steps away
• Harvey Homan — steps away