Site of the Organization of Lady Washington Chapter, NSDAR

The hotel where the chapter organized changed hands within a year. William Marsh Rice bought the Capitol Hotel in 1885. On September 23, 1900, he was murdered in New York by his valet, Charles F. Jones, and Albert T. Patrick, a lawyer who had forged papers to take his estate. The property passed to the Rice Institute, and the hotel took Rice's name. Jesse Jones leased the land and opened an eighteen-story Rice Hotel in 1913, then Houston's tallest building. John F. Kennedy attended a LULAC gala there on November 21, 1963, the night before Dallas.

What the plaque says

Site of the Organization of Lady Washington Chapter, NSDAR The Lady Washington Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) was organized on November 14, 1899, when 10 of the original 17 organizing members met in the western parlor of the Capitol Hotel (later known as the Rice Hotel) that occupied this site 1882-1911. The chapter was named in honor of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, wife of George Washington. The chapter was the first established in Houston and the fifth in Texas. The first social function hosted by the chapter was a patriotic reception held in the western parlor of the Capitol Hotel on February 21, 1900. The Lady Washington Chapter founding officers were regent Ella Hutchins Sydnor, vice-regent Lelia L. Crane, recording secretary Mary Botts Fitzgerald, corresponding secretary Margaret Hadley Foster, registrar Bettie Palmer Hutcheson, treasurer Bettie Heath Stuart, and historian Julia Hadley Franklin. These founding members organized and served on many of the social, patriotic, environmental, and educational organizations that helped form today's Houston and Harris county, including the City Federation of Women's Clubs, the Houston Public School Art League, and the board of the Houston Lyceum and Carnegie Library. The NSDAR was founded in 1890 to promote patriotism, preserve American history, and secure America's future through better education for children. Membership is open to women who descend from a man or woman who served as a sailor, soldier or civil officer, or was a recognized patriot who rendered material aid to the revolution. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.5 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 — 1.7 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 — 1.9 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 — 2.5 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

• Christ Church Cathedral — steps away
• Harris County Courthouse of 1910 — steps away
• The Houston Club — steps away
• Houston Bar Association — steps away