Original Oleander Planting in Galveston

Joseph Osterman, who is credited with bringing the plant, reached Galveston in 1839 and set up shop in a tent at Nineteenth and Church. The Handbook gives him the city's first ready-made coffins, first Lucifer matches and first strongbox, and says he carried palms and oleanders over in tubs in 1842. He lent to the young city, and he and his wife Rosanna built Galveston's first two-story house. Rosanna nursed fever victims in 1853 and turned the house into a hospital in the Civil War. She died in 1866 when a steamboat exploded on the Mississippi.

What the plaque says

Original Oleander Planting in Galveston Brought from Jamaica, 1841, by local businessman Joseph Osterman; planted by Osterman's sister, Mrs. Isidore Dyer, in yard of her home at this location. Transplanted when new structure was placed here, 1939, this oleander is an outgrowth of original Dyer planting. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1859 Ashton Villa — steps away
  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.
• Moody Mansion — steps away
  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.
• The Strand — 0.4 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.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 0.6 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.

More markers nearby

• The Rosenberg Library — steps away
• Galveston Office of the National Weather Service — steps away
• The Galveston Movement — 0.2 mi
• Avenue L Missionary Baptist Church — 0.2 mi