Sam Houston Oak

The oak stood on a family's farm, and the family's story runs past Houston's short stop. Bartlett D. McClure and his wife, Sarah Ann, took title to land on Peach Creek in 1831; he sat on the Gonzales committee of safety in 1835. Local accounts hold that wives of Alamo defenders learned of its fall at her house. After McClure died she married Charles Braches, a Prussian-born merchant, in 1843, and their two-story Greek Revival house still stands. The house belongs to Braches descendants and the oak grows by its drive; both are private.

What the plaque says

Sam Houston Oak 1/8 mile north is Sam Houston Oak where General Sam Houston established his headquarters camp March 13, 1836, after burning the town of Gonzales. Under this oak his small army was joined by many volunteers from the eastern settlements, who went with him to San Jacinto.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 8.4 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 8.9 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Palmetto State Park — 19 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 20 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• David Burkett — 7.7 mi
• Oak Forest Bridge — 7.7 mi
• The Immortal 32 — 8.4 mi
• Gonzales Cannon — 8.4 mi