Sam Houston Park

The park's first house, and the ground under the later park, held more than the plaque tells. Zerviah Noble and her daughter Catherine ran one of the area's earliest schools in the Kellum-Noble House, Houston's oldest building on its original site. Both the Kellums and the Nobles held enslaved African Americans, a history long left out of the house's story. After 1899 it was the park keeper's home, and its grounds briefly held Houston's first zoo. The remains in the 1847 Masonic Cemetery under the park were reinterred at Glenwood in 1959-60, where a monument lists the names.

What the plaque says

Sam Houston Park Sam Houston Park began with Nathaniel Kelly Kellum's purchase of 13 acres on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou in 1844 and 1845. Here Kellum built a brick factory, a tannery and his residence. The property was later sold to Zerviah Noble, who held it until it was purchased by the City of Houston in 1899 to become the first public park so designated by the City of Houston. The two-story brick house that had been built by Kellum in 1847 became the headquarters building for the Parks Department. The park was known as City Park until its name was officially changed to Sam Houston Park in 1903. By 1961, the park had expanded to nearly 21 acres, including property that had formerly been the Episcopal and Masonic Cemeteries, yet the popularity of the park as a leisure site had begun to wane. In 1959 almost two acres of land at the far western edge of the park had been taken for support piers and access ramps for the interstate 45 elevated roadway, possibly contributing to the park's decline in attractiveness to the public. The Kellum-Noble House stood vacant on the park grounds for several years, and by 1954 the City of Houston announced plans to raze the building. A group of preservation-minded citizens banded together to save the important landmark. The resulting Harris County Heritage and Conservation Society (now known as "The Heritage Society") not only achieved the goal of stabilizing the building and opening it as a museum, but also revitalized the park by creating a home for many historic and replica structures. Other public sculptures and monuments have also found their home in the park. Sam Houston Park has once again become a popular cultural, educational and leisure site for Houston's downtown residents. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — steps away
  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.
• 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.7 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 — 2.2 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.

More markers nearby

• Houston City, Republic of Texas — steps away
• Ancient Order of Pilgrims — steps away
• Sons of the Republic of Texas — steps away
• Houston Public Library — steps away