Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society

The Heritage Society has gathered ten buildings in Sam Houston Park, and several of them were moved here to be saved. Docents lead tours of three at a time, chosen from a list that runs from the 1823 Old Place to the 1905 Staiti House.

The most telling is the Yates House. The Reverend John Henry "Jack" Yates, who had been enslaved, built it in 1870 on Andrews Street in Freedmen's Town, the Fourth Ward neighborhood settled by freedpeople after the Civil War. Yates was minister of Antioch Baptist Church, founded Bethel Baptist Church, and helped organize the Houston Academy in 1894. His family gave the house to the society, and it was moved here in 1994 and furnished as the family lived. With the Fourth Ward Cottage and the 1847 Kellum-Noble House, it was named a UNESCO Slave Route Project site of memory on January 18, 2022.

Other buildings tell other Houstons. St. John Church was built in 1891 by German and Swiss farmers in northwest Harris County for a Lutheran congregation that worshipped in German into the 1930s. It was moved here in 1968, set east to west as it stood, with its cypress pews and an altar older than the building.