Robert Barr

Barr came to Texas before December 1833 and fought at San Jacinto as a private in William H. Patton's company of Sidney Sherman's regiment. Houston appointed him postmaster general on December 22, 1836, two days after Congress formally created the republic's Post Office Department. He followed John Rice Jones, who had organized the system on the United States model in 1835; its first route ran from San Felipe to the army, Bexar, Velasco and Cantonment Jessup in Louisiana. The government at first gave it no money, and appropriations began only in 1836. Jones succeeded Barr after his death.

What the plaque says

Robert Barr San Jacinto veteran. Postmaster general of the Republic under Houston and Lamar. Born in Urbana, Ohio in 1802. Died in Houston, Texas at 9 a.m. October 11, 1839, of yellow fever. Buried under the auspices of the Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges and the Milam Guards.

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.
• 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.
• 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.

More markers nearby

• William Daniel Durham — steps away
• George Allen — steps away
• John Kirby Allen — steps away
• John W. Moore — steps away