Site of Freeman Inn

The inn outlived the stagecoach era by sixty years. Betty Dunn of the Two Rivers Heritage Foundation, writing in the Navasota Examiner in 2021, describes an irregular L-shaped building at what is now 500 East Washington Avenue, where soldiers with no money slept in the attic, and says it was torn down in the early 1940s. It had an older rival: Ira Malcolm Camp's inn just east of town, built in the late 1840s and remembered for venison, bear, turkey and quail. Of the county's three stagecoach inns, only Fanthorp's at Anderson still stands.

What the plaque says

Site of Freeman Inn Built by Ira M. Freeman, 1856; way station and hotel for passengers on several stage lines through city. Two-story pine building housed many travelers, among them, Sam Houston. Important visitors, officers stayed here in Civil War. Coaches and teams were kept in Freeman's barns. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Navasota — steps away
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• Star of the Republic Museum — 6.1 mi
  A star-shaped museum of the Republic of Texas years, 1836 to 1846, built at Washington-on-the-Brazos after a Brenham campaign and opened on March 1, 1970.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 6.1 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.
• Fanthorp Inn State Historic Site — 8.8 mi
  A cedar-log dogtrot cabin of 1834 on the road through Anderson that grew into a seventeen-room inn and post office for travelers of the Republic, kept by one family until 1976.

More markers nearby

• Saint Paul's Episcopal Church — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Navasota — steps away
• First United Methodist Church of Navasota — steps away
• La Bahia Trail — 0.2 mi