Old Harrisburg

Sarah Bradley, born in 1812 into an Old Three Hundred family on the Brazos, married Archelaus Bynum Dodson on May 17, 1835, and moved to Harrisburg, where he became first lieutenant of a volunteer company that September. She reportedly offered to make its flag at a citizens' meeting in William Plunkett Harris's home. Lacking silk or bunting, she sewed three cotton squares: blue with a white star by the staff, then white, then red. The company carried it to Gonzales and through Concepción and the siege of Bexar, and it predates Joanna Troutman's flag of December 1835.

What the plaque says

Old Harrisburg Early Texas port and trading post. Site of state's first steam saw, grist mills and railroad terminal. Town founded, 1826, by John R. Harris, who was first settler in 1823. Became shipping center for early colonies, established when Texas was part of Mexico, with boats carrying cargo to and from Texas ports and points in the United States and Mexico. Became the seat of government of the Republic of Texas, March 22 - April 13, 1836, when David G. Burnet, President of the ad interim government and several of his cabinet resided near here in the home of Mrs. Jane Harris (site marked), widow of town founder. Here President Burnet adopted the flag for the Texas Navy. In 1835, local resident, Mrs. Sarah Dodson, had made here the first tri-color lone star flag. General Santa Anna attacked the town with 750 Mexican soldiers on April 16 attempting to capture Burnet and his cabinet. The whole town was burned. After Texas gained its independence at nearby San Jacinto, the town was rebuilt and again thrived. The Buffalo, Bayou, Brazos and Colorado, first railroad in Texas began here in 1852 and by the Civil War made the town a Confederate rail center. Became a part of Houston, by annexation, in 1926. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 5.4 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 6.2 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.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 6.4 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 6.8 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

• Glendale Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Site of General Offices, Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad — 0.5 mi
• Lorenzo de Zavala — 1.6 mi
• "Constitution" Bend — 2.4 mi