Site of Carry Nation's Hotel

Columbia was one stop in a longer Texas decade. Carry Nation grew up in a slaveholding Kentucky family and, a sickly child, was often cared for in the slave quarters. In Texas the Methodist and Episcopal churches barred her from teaching Sunday school, so she began a weekly class of her own. The sale of the San Bernard plantation bought the Nations a Richmond hotel, where David wrote against the Jaybirds in the Houston Post and drew harassment. They left for Kansas in 1889. In 1902 and 1904 University of Texas students persuaded her that professors were drunkards.

What the plaque says

Site of Carry Nation's Hotel During a brief and troubled time in her life, Carry Amelia Moore Nation (1846-1911) operated the "Old Columbia Hotel" on this site about 1880. She later achieved fame as a hatchet-wielding crusader against the use of alcoholic drink and tobacco. Born in Kentucky to slave-owning parents, Carry Moore and her family moved to Grayson County, Texas, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. After an unhappy first marriage in Missouri to an alcoholic, she married David Nation in 1877. They acquired 1,700 acres of farmland on the San Bernard River west of here. Unsuccessful at farming and marriage, David moved to Brazoria to practice law, and about 1880 Carry moved here to Columbia to operate the hotel owned by A. R. and Jesse W. Park. Her name is on the Columbia Methodist Church roll. She lived at the hotel with her daughter Charlien Gloyd, "Mother Gloyd" (Carry's first mother-in-law), and David's daughter Lola. David Nation also operated a saddle shop just southwest of this site. The family soon moved to Richmond, Texas, to operate a hotel, then moved to Kansas in 1889. The Nations were divorced in 1901 after Carry began her crusade against saloons. She lectured at the University of Texas in Austin in 1902 and 1904. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 2.1 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 10 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Brazos Bend State Park — 16 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 20 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.

More markers nearby

• Bell's Landing — steps away
• Near Site of Dance Gun Shop — steps away
• Near Site of the First Capitol of the Republic of Texas — 1.7 mi
• Columbia Rosenwald School — 1.9 mi