Woodland Heights Community

The plaque tells the developers' plan; the people who lived in it are the other story. Frank Murphy Black, first dean of Houston Junior College, the forerunner of the University of Houston, lived on Highland Avenue from 1908 until 1932. The novelist William Goyen grew up here from 1923 until he left for the Navy in 1939. John Tower, later Texas's first Republican senator since Reconstruction, lived here while his father pastored Woodland Methodist in the early 1930s. County Commissioner Squatty Lyons, who oversaw the Astrodome, lived on Florence, and Mayor Kathy Whitmire on Bayland.

What the plaque says

Woodland Heights Community In the early 20th century, William A. Wilson, with the finanical backing of James A. Baker, Jr., Joseph B. Bowles, Rufus Cage and J.M. Cotton, established the Woodland Heights community north of and topographically higher than downtown Houston. Among the partners, William Wilson chose to live on Bayland Street in the Woodland Heights neighborhood. The developers' firm, the William Wilson Realty Company, platted the addition as a streetcar suburb, where residents would commute to and from work and shopping by use of public transportation. Built in the southwestern area of Germantown, the community included water piped into every house, concrete sidewalks, graded streets, and trees and shrubs for beautification purposes.The developers began selling land and constructing houses in 1907. Residents soon organized community institutions, including the Beauchamp Springs Presbyterian, Woodland Baptist and Zion Lutheran Churches, and the Woodland Masonic Lodge #1157, A.F. & A.M. The Woodland Heights Garden Club later developed, which was followed by the Woodland Heights Civic Association. The developers also provided for education by deeding land to the Travis Elementary School (previously Beauchamp Springs Public School). Businesses, including several grocery stores, would also open in the primarily residential neighborhood. Many of the neighborhood's historic structures, built between 1907 and 1925, and reflecting Arts and Crafts and Bungalow styles, remain. The community was later incorporated into Houston, and today, Woodland Heights continues to be a thriving neighborhood. (2008) SUPPLEMENTAL PLAQUE: In 1903, Houston city limits expanded to Pecore Street. Full city services, trolley access and easy home payment plans assured the success for the Woodland Heights development.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.9 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 3.6 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.
• Emancipation Park — 3.6 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 3.7 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

• Zion Lutheran Church — 0.2 mi
• Hortense Sparks Malsch Ward — 0.4 mi
• Mollie Bailey — 0.5 mi
• Huelga Schools — 0.7 mi