Site of "Orozimbo"

Santa Anna was held here from July to November 1836, and the stories have grown. One account has him chained to a live oak, another has Dr. Phelps pumping poison from his stomach; the Legislative Reference Library calls the poison tale improbable. What the Handbook documents is the sequel. In 1842 Santa Anna spared Phelps's son Orlando, a Mier prisoner, and sent him home with $500 in gold, and reportedly followed with Christmas bedspreads for the family for years. A hurricane in 1932 destroyed the house, though the oak still stood in 1990.

What the plaque says

Site of "Orozimbo" Home of Dr. James Aeneas Phelps, a member of "Old Three Hundred" of Austin's colony, hospital surgeon of the Texas Army at San Jacinto. Here Santa Anna was detained as a prisoner from July to November, 1836.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 7.3 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.
• Brazos Bend State Park — 8.8 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.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 18 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.
• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 21 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

• W. H. Abrams Well No. 1 — 8.0 mi
• Site of Carry Nation's Hotel — 8.1 mi
• Bell's Landing — 8.1 mi
• James Briton "Brit" Bailey — 8.1 mi