Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site

The convention opened on March 1, 1836, in near-freezing weather, in an unfinished building that belonged to Noah T. Byars and his partner Peter M. Mercer. A group of Washington businessmen rented it for the delegates and never got around to paying. Forty-four delegates were there the first day and fifty-nine came in all. They adopted the Declaration of Independence on March 2, began signing it the next day, and then turned to writing a constitution. Late on March 16 they elected David G. Burnet president and Lorenzo de Zavala vice president of an interim government, and in the early hours of March 17 they adjourned in haste.

Nothing of the 1836 town stands. The state bought about fifty acres of the townsite in 1916 and built a replica of the hall, later replaced with a better one, and the park now covers 293 acres beside the Brazos. In 1936 the state moved here the house Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic, had built at his Barrington plantation. Barrington is now a living history farm set in 1850, where interpreters in period dress plant, harvest and tend livestock. The Jones family made it a successful cotton farm with enslaved labor after Texas joined the Union, and the farm tells that history too.