Site of the Home of Mirabeau B. Lamar

Lamar first retired to his place near Richmond at the end of 1841, with Texas near bankruptcy. His daughter Rebecca's death in 1843 plunged him into melancholia, and he sought relief in travel. Having once opposed annexation, he lobbied for it in Washington, and he fought at Monterrey in the Mexican War. He married Henrietta Maffitt in New Orleans in 1851, served twenty months as United States minister to Nicaragua and Costa Rica from 1857, and died of a heart attack at the Richmond plantation on December 19, 1859, two months after coming home.

What the plaque says

Site of the Home of Mirabeau B. Lamar (1798-1859) Father of Texas education. President of the Republic of Texas, 1836-1841. He lived here from 1851 to 1859.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• The Menil Collection — 24 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 24 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 24 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

• Fort Bend — steps away
• Wyly Martin — 0.4 mi
• Constantine W. Buckley — 0.7 mi
• Erastus ("Deaf") Smith — 0.7 mi