Site of Confederate Prison Compound

The plaque counts 350 Federals held here in January 1863; a 2024 University of Houston-Downtown history follows them. This was one of the Allen and Fulton cotton warehouses above White Oak Bayou, a way station before parole or the camps at Hempstead and Tyler. Men of the 42nd Massachusetts and the Harriet Lane, taken at Galveston on New Year's Day, came up by rail; enlisted men marched down Main Street, officers went to the Kennedy Building. Black captives were treated as runaways and many sold for $500 each, though Private Alexander Hobbs wrote that most were free born.

What the plaque says

Site of Confederate Prison Compound Before 1861, site of warehouse serving Buffalo Bayou shipping. At times during 1861-65, the building here housed prisoners of war. In Jan. 1863 it held 350 Federals captured by Houston-based Confederate army of Gen. John B. Magruder. The city also had two other compounds where prisoners of war were held. Among many Houston enterprises vital to the Confederacy were troop training fields, military hospitals, an ammunition depot, two foundries, five railroads. City was headquarters for the Military District of Texas, which included Arizona and New Mexico. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.9 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.
• Emancipation Park — 2.2 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 — 2.4 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 — 3.0 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

• Allen's Landing — steps away
• Old Market Square — 0.3 mi
• Harris County Courthouse of 1910 — 0.4 mi
• Harris County — 0.4 mi