Houstonians know the name but not his place in area’s history
On a sloping bluff overlooking the noisy, perpetually busy Houston Ship Channel, cut off from a nearby working-class neighborhood by railroad tracks, a machine shop and other workaday ship-channel enterprises, is a green and leafy oasis called Glendale Cemetery. Most Houstonians, I suspect, don’t even know the graveyard exists — I didn’t until a few years ago — and if they know, they may not know how to get to it (short of by hearse).
Parking next to the machine shop on a sunny morning last week and stepping across the tracks, I found the iron gates secured with several rusty locks, so I climbed over. (Straddling the iron bars, I couldn’t decide which Chronicle headline would be worse: “Local columnist arrested for trespassing,” or “Local columnist impaled on cemetery barricade.”)
Glendale Cemetery, not to be confused with the renowned Glenwood Cemetery a dozen miles up the bayou, is the oldest cemetery in Houston. On a compact 6 acres two blocks east of
Broadway, beneath spreading live oaks and mature magnolia trees, it was established in 1826 as the Harris Family Cemetery (renamed Glendale in 1893). A full decade before there was a Houston, the graveyard was a peaceful final resting place overlooking the bayou.
In the corner nearest the Ship Channel is the oldest marker in the graveyard. As a blue-and-white barge slowly floated past, I stood at the grave of John Birdsall, a New York politician and circuit judge who moved to Texas in 1837. That same year, President Sam Houston appointed Birdsall attorney general of the Republic of Texas. The next year, Houston appointed him pro tempore chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He died in 1839 at age 37.
Birdsall was the victim of a yellow-fever epidemic, as were the first 31 people interred at the pioneer graveyard. They were quickly buried in a mass grave with no markers to remember them.
Near the Birdsall grave is a marker commemorating a relative by marriage who at age 39 also died during a yellow-fever epidemic, in New Orleans. His name was John Richardson Harris, and in today’s parlance, he was a go-getter.
Born in New York in 1790, Harris married Jane Birdsall in 1813, and the couple settled in a small town in upstate New York before migrating to Ste. Genevieve, Mo. That’s where they met Texas empresario Moses Austin, who persuaded them to join his fledgling colony. Sailing his own sloop from New Orleans in 1823, Harris explored several sites along the Texas coast before nosing into Buffalo Bayou. He took possession of some 4,428 acres of land at the confluence of Bray’s and Buffalo bayous, where navigation ended. The Harris grant today would extend from Buffalo Bayou on the north to Airport Boulevard on the south.
With his wife and children still in Missouri, the young New Yorker immediately began laying out a town he named Harrisburg, most likely after himself and perhaps after Harrisburg, Pa., which bore the name of his greatgrandfather. Within a few months the new Harrisburg boasted a general store and the first steampowered sawmill in Texas. Shaping lumber from majestic primeval pine trees rafted directly from the banks of the bayou, Harris’ mill was soon a profitable business. He and his three brothers also captained a fleet of sloops and schooners that plied the Gulf Coast from Harrisburg to New Orleans and southward to Tampico. Two of their schooners, the Rights of Man and the Mauchana, would later be used in the Texas Revolution.
In December 1835, the provisional government on the verge of separating from Mexico named Harrisburg the capital of the ‘free, sovereign and independent” Republic of Texas. Four months later, Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna burned the town to the ground. Rebuilt in 1839, some 1,400 people moved back.
By then, the young man who bequeathed his name to the town had been gone for a decade. A granddaughter, Adele Briscoe Looscan, erected a cenotaph in his honor in the 1930s, but he’s actually buried in New Orleans, the city of his death.
“In the death of Mr. John R. Harris,” the Texas Gazette noted at the time, “the colony has lost an enterprising citizen, and his friends have been bereaved of one whose loss will not easily be replaced.”
“He seems to have been the only one of that early period who foresaw the future of Buffalo Bayou, on whose bosom now float big ships from foreign and domestic ports,” Looscan, the granddaughter, wrote in 1928 in the “Southwestern Historical Quarterly.”
Three years after her arrival, Harris’s widow, Jane Birdsall Harris, hosted the cabinet of the Texas provisional government, desperate men on the run from the Mexican army. “Although poorly equipped to accommodate this large accession to her household, she cheerfully made them welcome, and sacrificed her own comfort for their convenience,” Looscan wrote.
After cabinet members fled to Galveston, the Harris’s home, sawmill and other valuable property went up in flames with the rest of Harrisburg. The family was not compensated, although Looscan wrote that the man who actually “kindled the flame” returned to rebuild the house for the widow Harris and her children. He used logs hewn by Mexican prisoners captured at San Jacinto.
The First Congress of the Republic of Texas formed Harrisburg County in 1836 and changed the name to Harris County three years later. Houston annexed Harrisburg in 1928.
So, the county known far and wide is named after a man few know, despite his achievements. Why is that, I asked local historian Dan Worrall. Why is his name — and the name of his noteworthy wife — barely worth a mention in the history books?
“(Harris) died too soon, and so missed his time in the spotlight,” Worrall said, noting that the town he laid out was a much better site for a city than the one the Allen brothers founded more than a decade later.
With deep water and a naturally wide bayou, with lumber being shipped to Mexico from the Harris sawmill, Harrisburg already was a working port by the time Santa Anna’s soldiers torched it. Worrall noted that Harrisburg also was the original terminus of the San Felipe Trail, “meaning that cotton from the colony’s interior could go there, the most efficient shipment route to international trade.” (As I mentioned in last week’s column, Worrall is the author of a book about the historic significance of the San Felipe Trail.)
Making their slow way up Buffalo Bayou in 1836, the Allen brothers immediately recognized the superiority of the Harrisburg site. They tried to buy the remains of the town from John Harris’s heirs, but the family was embroiled in a probate fight and the land was not for sale.
The young New Yorkers looked inland. Although it took steamboats three days to negotiate the 12 miles to their landing, with passengers and crew alike clearing away overhanging branches and submerged debris, the Allens managed to build a city. And a viable port. In Worrall’s words, “the rest is history.”
Sitting on an old wooden bench inside Glendale Cemetery, I realized that I like this part of Houston. I like the peacefulness of the graveyard but also the noise, the bustle, the ceaseless enterprise of the adjacent ship channel just outside its gates. It’s all a reflection of the ambitious young man who got it started. And we hardly know his name.
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If you would like to visit the cemetery, don’t scale the fence. Call the Glendale Cemetery Association for information (281-2887888).