Following old trail led to real story of Houston’s roots
On a postage stampsized city lot just off South Post Oak Lane near the Galleria, where luxury townhouses cast shadows and gleaming office towers loom over trees at the rear of the property, two venerable grave stones are all that’s left of the antebellum Morse-Bragg Cemetery. One of the markers, its inscription barely legible after decades of weathering, commemorates the final resting place of Lovett Taft Jr., for whom the Montrose-area street is named. Before the Civil War, he and his brother Joseph were proprietors of Houston’s first book store. The other marker commemorates Mary Bragg, who was born in Vermont in 1822 and died in Houston in 1873.
Developers have had their avaricious eyes on the property since the 1920s, and its future as a cemetery and historic site was secured only recently. After successful efforts by family members to fend off eager buyers, it now belongs to Harris County, with Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack responsible for preserving the site as a pocket park.
Dan Worrall, a retired Shell geologist and a Morse family descendant, had no idea that his family’s efforts to save the cemetery would set him on a road, both literally and figuratively, that could change our perception of Houston history. The cemetery, as it turns out, was just off the San Felipe-to-Harrisburg Trail, the pioneer route connecting Stephen F. Austin’s settlement to the Buffalo Bayou community that was Houston’s forerunner. “Houston wouldn’t be here without that road,” Worrall told me last weekend.
Meandering for 50 miles or so along Buffalo Bayou and points west, San Felipe Trail was the literal road that made Houston what it is. The figurative road Worrall has been traveling the last few years has taken
him deep into Houston’s fascinating past, much of it forgotten when mile after mile of subdivisions, strip centers and office complexes carpeted ancient forest and prairie and overwhelmed early settlements. The result is ”Pleasant Bend: Upper Buffalo Bayou and the San Felipe Trail in the Nineteenth Century,” a thoroughly researched book the 66-year-old Fulshear resident published himself. The 420-page tome and Worrall’s ongoing efforts to resurrect remnants of our shared past is quite a departure for a man whose passion for history since his retirement a decade ago had been devoted to his favorite musical instrument, the concertina. Now that he’s on the local-history road, there’s no getting off.
Austin’s colony hacked out the trail in 1830, when “built” meant chopping down trees and prying out stumps. Their wagon road was the first public thoroughfare in Harris County. Six years after its completion, the trail would be the primary escape route for Texian families fleeing Santa Anna’s army during the Runaway Scrape.
Trail made Houston
Once Texas gained its independence, plantation owners along the Colorado and Brazos rivers came to realize that the shallow and treacherous Brazos was not the best and most efficient route to get their cotton to Gulf vessels waiting to ship it to market. The San Felipe Trail allowed them to transport their cash crop overland to Harrisburg and, after 1836, to Houston. Bales stacked on Buffalo Bayou wharves would be loaded onto barges headed downstream to Galveston and then offloaded onto ships bound for New Orleans and ports beyond. The trail made Houston a bustling center of commerce years before construction of the ship channel.
In the 1840s, thousands of German immigrants landed at Galveston and headed west along the San Felipe Trail in covered wagons. They founded Industry, La Grange and other Central Texas towns before venturing into the isolated Hill Country to the west. Others settled in communities long since subsumed into the Bayou City. Neighborhoods we know as Spring Branch, White Oak and Bear Creek were originally German settlements along the San Felipe Trail.
After Juneteenth, 1865, thousands of formerly enslaved African Americans trudged away from Brazos and Colorado river plantations, their meager belongings wrapped in tattered blankets. They headed eastward along the trail to Houston and freedom.
Widow George’s pond
After the Texas Western Narrow Gauge Railroad laid tracks in 1875 along what’s now Westheimer Road, the San Felipe Road slowly slipped into history. These days, if you know where to look — and I didn’t before traipsing around with Worrall on a windy Saturday afternoon — you can still see remnants. On Fondren Road, for example, is a good-sized pond with a fountain spouting water into the air and Vargos on the Lake condominiums lining its banks. In the 1850s, the spring-fed pond belonged to Harriet George, a thrice-married single mother living with her children on an isolated frontier farm south of Buffalo Bayou. The water level in the bayou is about 20 to 30 feet lower than the pond, thus producing energy for a saw-mill water wheel. George’s mill was adjacent to vast stands of riparian forest, and the San Felipe Trail provided a way for her and other mill owners to market their finished products.
George was one of several single women, usually widows, making a life for themselves and their families in the vicinity of the trail. The most prominent may have been Elizabeth Wheaton, who operated a farm, inn and blacksmith shop at the Buffalo Bayou ford, about halfway between San Felipe de Austin and Harrisburg. Her husband Joel built the inn in 1831, perhaps at the behest of Stephen F. Austin, who realized that travelers would need help getting their heavy two- and three-team ox wagons down the 20-to30-foot incline, across the stream and up the other side. They’d likely need a blacksmith, as well, to repair the invariable broken chain or axle. Room and board at the inn was $3 a night.
Site possibilities
Joel Wheaton died in 1838. His wife operated the inn until her death in 1851. The old Wheaton home survived intact until a fire took it down in 1956.
Today, Highway 6 crosses Buffalo Bayou at the site of Wheaton’s Ford. The inn was just to the south of the ford, both near the present-day Terry Hershey Park and Barker Dam. As Worrall and I stood on the bike path atop the dam, he laid out his vision for reconstructing the historic site on property belonging to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There’s room for a replica of Wheaton’s Inn on a piece of restored Katy Prairie, as well as a rebuilt segment of the San Felipe Trail, repurposed as a bike path. There’s even room for a Harris County historical museum. Worrall can imagine true-to-life sculptures of an ox-drawn wagon carrying a load of cotton, a German immigrant family heading westward in a covered wagon and African-Americans on their trek to freedom after Juneteenth, all on the restored trail.
Choosing his words carefully, the Harris County Historical Commission member says the corps is “willing to entertain the idea” of a heritage and recreational site on the grassy open area between Highway 6 and the dam. What the project will require, of course, is money and an organization willing to take charge.
“None of this is in the Houston history books,” Worrall said, shouting to make himself heard over the roar of highway traffic. “Page one is always the Allen brothers. That’s like saying the history of America begins with the Declaration of Independence.”