Site of General Offices, Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad

Harrisburg stood on the survey of John Richardson Harris, a New York entrepreneur, before 1825, and in 1826 he named it for himself and for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, founded by his great-grandfather. A sawmill cut local timber, ships ran to American and Mexican ports, and freight for San Felipe landed here before going overland to the Brazos. On April 16, 1836, Santa Anna burned the whole town except John W. Moore's house. It recovered, was incorporated in 1837, and was joined in 1839 with Hamilton across the bayou under a trust of Boston investors.

What the plaque says

Site of General Offices, Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railroad Building of a railroad from here to the Brazos, to handle commerce of rich plantations, was attempted unsuccessfully in 1840-41 by early merchant Andrew Briscoe and the Harrises who founded Harrisburg. Their holdings, including Harrisburg townsite, were sold in 1847 to a group of bostonians and Texans-- headed by San Jacinto hero Gen. Sidney Sherman-- who succeeded in building the first railroad in Texas. The Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado Railway was chartered Feb. 11, 1850. Construction materials, shipped from Boston to Galveston, came up Buffalo Bayou by barges. Chief engineer John A. Williams began survey in May 1851. When a few miles of track were laid, the first passengers ever to ride a train in Texas went to Thomas Point (3 mi. W), April 21, 1853, to a celebration featuring salutes from "Twin Sisters" cannon used in 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Four months later tracks reached Stafford's Point, and B. B. B. & C. operations officially began, with Harrisburg as the terminal. One block north of here were depot, roundhouse and docks; a half block south, site of 1836 Texas Capitol. The road was sold in 1870, and name was changed to Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio. It eventually became part of the Southern Pacific system. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — 5.3 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 — 6.1 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.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 6.2 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 6.8 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.

More markers nearby

• Glendale Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Old Harrisburg — 0.5 mi
• Lorenzo de Zavala — 1.2 mi
• "Constitution" Bend — 1.9 mi