Near Site of Isaac Batterson Home

Ezekiel Thomas had settled the land on a Mexican grant in 1824. Clinton farmed and ranched until the port of Houston grew after 1876: Charles Morgan, a Clinton resident and steamship owner, dredged Buffalo Bayou, cut a canal opposite Morgan's Point, built a cotton compress and ran a railroad from Houston, and Clinton became the terminus for much of the bayou shipping. The first refinery was built by the Galena Signal Oil Company, later bought by Texaco. In 1935, refused a post office because Texas already had a Clinton, the town took the oil company's name.

What the plaque says

Near Site of Isaac Batterson Home Famed for its part in winning the War for Texas Independence, the flooring of this house was, on April 19, 1836, appropriated by General Sam Houston to build rafts to ferry his army across rain-swollen Buffalo Bayou. Although 248 soldiers, most of whom were ill, remained at the Batterson place, Houston's army was victorious in the Battle of San Jacinto two days later. This land, originally part of the Ezekiel Thomas Estate, was purchased in 1835 by Batterson. The settlement he started (now Galena Park) he named "Clinton" for his former home in New York. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 7.4 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.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 8.0 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 — 8.2 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 8.9 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.

More markers nearby

• Crown Hill Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• Allen Ranch — 1.9 mi
• Glendale Cemetery — 2.2 mi
• Site of General Offices, Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad — 2.3 mi