The wheeling-dealing duo who turned mud into gold
Brothers from New York founded a frontier boomtown on Fever Coast
On a May day in 1837, John James Audubon, the worldfamous naturalist and painter, stepped off the steamer Yellow Stone at the foot of Main Street in Houston and caught his first glimpse of the capital city of the world’s newest nation.
Audubon commented on the “drunk and hallooing” residents “stumbling about in the mud in every direction.”
On his way to President Sam Houston’s “mansion,” he sloshed through ankle-deep water past half-furnished houses, tents and roofless buildings. A gathering of Cabinet members welcomed the naturalist into a log house consisting of two rooms separated by a dog run, the house filthy and cluttered with camp beds and trunks. Such was the Texas “White House.”
An anonymous visitor who got to Houston the same year as Audubon found a one-story frame building, several log cabins and “a few linen tents which were used for groceries together with three or four shanties made of poles set in the ground, and covered and weathered with rough splint shingles.” The grocers stayed busy; they were purveyors of hard liquor as well as food. Residents used pigs to clean the streets.
Yet another visitor, John Dancy, was impressed with the energy of the new city, even though he described it as “one of the muddiest and most disagreeable places on earth.”
Such were the early impressions of the place John and Augustus Allen, young New York wheeler-dealers, pitched to would-be Houstonians: “hand- some and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well-watered.”
The new town, the Allens claimed, “is located at a point on the river which must ever command the trade of the largest and richest portion of Texas,” adding that “when the rich lands of this country shall be settled, a trade will flow to it, making it, beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium
TOP: Paddlewheel boat and cotton being loaded at Allen’s Landing in 1868.
of Texas.” They were right about that, of course, even though their prediction that ships from New York and New Orleans would sail up Buffalo Bayou to Houston’s front door turned out to be another bit of boomer hyperbole.
The Allen boys were audacious fellows, to be sure, and plenty of people believed them. They came, they stayed, they built a city, despite the mud, the mosquitoes and the periodic yellow-fever epidemics.
John Kirby Allen was born in 1810 in Orrville, N.Y., a village near Syracuse, and took his first job as a hotel bellboy at age 7. Three years later he became a clerk in a store and at 16 became a partner with a friend who owned a hat store in Chittenango, N.Y., where his older brother, Augustus Chapman Allen, was a mathematics professor until 1827. John Allen sold his interest in the hat store and followed his brother to New York City, where they were stockholders in H. and H. Canfield Company until 1832, when they moved to Texas. They settled first in the East Texas village of San Augustine and then in Nacogdoches and, like numerous other newcomers to Texas, jumped into land speculation.
When the Texas Revolution broke out, the brothers stayed out of the army but purchased
at their own expense a schooner called the Brutus and had it outfitted with armaments to protect the Texas coast and to land troops and supplies. They also served on committees to raise loans on Texas lands to fund the revolution and the development of the Republic.
Late in 1836, the Allens paid $5,000 for the John Austin half league, at the confluence of Buffalo and White Oak bayous, a few miles upstream from Harrisburg (now part of Houston). When they realized that Buffalo Bayou was navigable, they decided to establish a town on the west bank and name it after their friend, the hero of the Texas Revolution, hoping that a name association with the popular general would attract investors.
They also lobbied the Texas Congress — John Allen was a member — to select Houston as capital of the Republic of Texas. In October 1836, John Allen promised Congress that he and his brother would construct a capital for $10,000 as a donation to the government. In 1837, the seat of government was moved from Columbia to Houston (for a couple of years, at least).
On Aug. 15, 1838, John Allen died at his brother’s home of “a bilious fever” (either yellow fever or malaria). He was 28. The next year, 12 percent of the young city’s population died in the first of 10 yellow fever epidemics that beset the city in the next three decades. The Texas Congress voted to move the capital to Austin.
Augustus Allen was a Houston resident until 1850, when a protracted family feud over land and property, along with health problems, compelled him to move to Mexico, where he held consular positions with the U.S. government and he lived until shortly before his death in 1864. He’s buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. His younger brother is buried in Founder’s Memorial Cemetery on Dallas Street near downtown Houston.
That would be the end of the Allen Brothers saga, the tale of two ambitious young New Yorkers who founded a city, except for an Allen family connection that only occasionally makes it into the history books. It’s the story of a third founder, a woman who is about as obscure as Allen’s Landing is to most modern-day Houstonians.
Charlotte Marie Baldwin was born in Onondaga County, N.Y., in 1805 and at age 26 married a young mathematics professor in nearby Cittenango, one Augustus Chapman Allen. When her husband and brother-in-law purchased the land on Buffalo Bayou, it was likely her money that they used, money she had inherited from her prosperous father’s estate in Baldwinsville, N.Y. Because of the prohibition against wives controlling property, her name does not appear on the deed.
When John Allen died, Augustus and his four surviving brothers quarreled over the settlement of the estate, owned “conjointly” and valued at $814,462.50, Charlotte Allen got roped into the family feud. Charlotte and Augustus couldn’t resolve their differences and separated in 1850 without divorcing. When Augustus left Houston for Mexico, he deeded everything he owned in Texas to his wife.
She lived in Houston for 45 years after her husband left and was a developer, businesswoman and philanthropist. She raised cattle and had her own brand, and in 1857 got $12,000
TOP: Allen’s Landing in 2016 has been remodeled as a destination for hikers and bikers in the shadow of downtown.
for the site of the former Texas capitol, which had become the location of the Capitol Hotel, later the Rice Hotel. She also deeded property to Houston for the first of its city halls, now the site of Market Square. A new steamer on Buffalo Bayou was named in her honor, as was an elementary school, the first public school in Houston to be named for a woman.
When Charlotte Allen died in 1895 at age 90, flags in Houston flew at half staff. “The Mother of Houston,” as newspapers called her, is buried at Glenwood Cemetery.