Hist 2 - Exam 1

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Houston Tap

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Section 10 of an Act to Incorporate the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway Company authorized the City of Houston to build or have built a railroad to connect with or "to tap" the BBB&C. On January 26, 1856, the Texas Legislature gave the city permission to impose a one percent ad valorem tax on real and personal property as well as a license tax on "Taverns, Groceries, Barrooms, Tippling-Houses, Nine and Ten-Pin Allies and Billiard Tables" for the purpose of constructing a railroad, provided that the citizens of Houston approved such taxes at a special election. At the election held for that purpose on February 19, 1856, the railroad tax was approved by a margin of 250 to 15. Construction of the railroad, commonly called the Houston Tap, began on April 7. Even as the line was being built, plans were underway to extend the railroad into Brazoria and Wharton counties. It connected to a Harrisburg track. It was a minimal investment. Houston didn’t really fund it that well and it didn’t take a lot of money.

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William Marsh Rice

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merchant, financier, and philanthropist; After the panic of 1837 Rice moved to Houston, Texas, where he started a partnership and dry goods store. He endowed rice university and supplied plantations and settlers inland with goods from New Orleans and New York and acted as banker because there weren’t any banks in Houston; In 1841 Rice offered a gold cup to the planter who brought in the first twenty bales of cotton and a silver cup for the first five (helped trade). In 1851 he and other investors established the Houston and Galveston Navigation Company, and by 1858 he was the owner of a brig called the William M. Rice, which carried ice from Boston to Galveston during the summers. Rice also served as a director of the Houston Insurance Company, which insured carriers and freight (gave people security to invest in commerce involving Houston). He became a millionaire by 1865 and retired back to NYC (a lot of people went to Houston to make money and leave to retire). In 1859, with other investors, Rice incorporated the Houston Cotton Compress Company. He was also an incorporator and director of several railroads, including the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado, the Houston Tap and Brazoria, the Washington County, and the Houston and Texas Central. At the outbreak of the Civil War he left his home to be used as a military hospital and transferred his business to Matamoros, where he operated through the federal blockade (blockade didn’t hurt Houston as much as Galveston).

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Battle of Sabine Pass

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September 8, 1863, turned back one of several Union attempts to invade and occupy part of Texas during the Civil War. The United States Navy blockaded the Texas coast beginning in the summer of 1861, while Confederates fortified the major ports. Union interest in Texas and other parts of the Confederacy west of the Mississippi River resulted primarily from the need for cotton by northern textile mills and concern about French intervention in the Mexican civil war. In September 1863 Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks sent by transport from New Orleans 4,000 soldiers under the command of Gen. William B. Franklin to gain a foothold at Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The navy commander, Lt. Frederick Crocker, then formed a plan for the gunboats to enter the pass and silence the fort so the troops could land. The Confederates captured 300 Union prisoners and two gunboats. The Davis Guards, who suffered no casualties during the battle, received the thanks of the Confederate Congress for their victory. Careful fortification, range marking, and artillery practice had produced a successful defense of Sabine Pass.

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Occupation of Galveston

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Business collapsed, however, when the Civil War brought a blockade of the port by Union ships and a brief occupation of the town by federal troops. The dramatic battle of Galveston on New Year's Day, 1863, ended the occupation, but the port remained isolated and served mainly as a departure point for small blockade runners. Following the war Galveston quickly recovered; northern troops were stationed in the city, and a depleted state demanded the trade goods denied by the blockade and the war effort.

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John and Augustus Allen

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founders of Houston and backer of the Texas Revolution; both were from the Jacksonian Era; 1832 – moved to Nacogdoches,Texas (he didn’t start in Houston); they went toward Buffalo Bayou; tried to purchase Harrisburg; owner couldn’t sell so they found another piece of land close by to buy – used Augutus’ wife’s money; put out an ad to attract settlers but the ad was a big lie – said that it was healthy, had natural access to the sea, waterway to Galveston (Houston was founded on a lie and on Jacksonian beliefs); the town actually had no sea access, it had lots of diseases; the location was awful; luck and audacity helped Houston become successful

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Archives War

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In March 1842 a division of the Mexican army under Gen. Rafael Vásquez appeared at San Antonio demanding the surrender of the town; the Texans were not prepared to resist and withdrew. On March 10 President Sam Houston called an emergency session of the Texas Congress. Fearing that the Mexicans would move on Austin, he named Houston as the meetingplace. The citizens of Austin, fearful that the president wished to make Houston the capital, formed a vigilante committee of residents and warned department heads that any attempt to move state papers would be met with armed resistance. President Houston called the Seventh Congress into session and gave orders to remove the archives but not to resort to bloodshed. The Austin vigilantes were unprepared for the raid, and the rangers loaded the archives in wagons and drove away. Only a few shots were fired before the rangers gave up the papers in order to avoid bloodshed. The archives were returned to Austin and remained there unmolested until Austin became the capital again in 1844.

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Thomas William House

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House formed a partnership with Charles Shearn, who was later chief justice of Harris County. In 1840 he began accepting bank deposits. Alone in business for a time, he produced and sold the first ice cream in Houston. He restricted his confections to one side of the store and filled the other with dry goods, developing an extensive wholesale trade with the interior. After a second association with Shearn, in 1853 House bought a large dry goods and grocercies business which he paid $40,000, the largest sum of money to change hands in Houston up to that time. The firm was then the largest wholesaler in the state; it accepted cotton in payment for goods and set up cotton factoring as a separate department. His great private bank grew out of cotton factoring. He also worked with the Houston Direct Navigation Company and the Buffalo Bayou Ship Channel Company, both of which contributed to the development of Houston. House served a term as mayor of Houston in 1862. In 1866 he organized the city's first public utility, the Houston Gas Company. Hotels and other public places were the first to install gas, then private homes accepted the innovation, and finally gas street lights appeared. He was active in organizing the first street railway, the Board of Trade and Cotton Exchange, and the Houston and Texas Central and other railroads. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder had a high regard for House's services in the Confederacy. His cotton wagons made their slow way to the Mexican border and returned with loads of vital supplies. In 1851 House helped organize the Houston and Galveston Navigation Company. He also worked with the Houston Direct Navigation Company and the Buffalo Bayou Ship Channel Company, all of which contributed to the development of Houston. House served a term as mayor of Houston in 1862. In 1866 he organized the city's first public utility, the Houston Gas Company. The plant was erected and the mains laid in the face of general public indifference. Hotels and other public places were the first to install gas, then private homes accepted the innovation, and finally gas street lights appeared. It is difficult to overestimate House's share in the building of Houston. He was active in organizing the first street railway, the Board of Trade and Cotton Exchange, and the Houston and Texas Central and other railroads. Gen. John Bankhead Magruder had a high regard for House's services in the Confederacy. His cotton wagons made their slow way to the Mexican border and returned with loads of vital supplies. If any guards of the blockading US fleet were missing from their stations, they were chasing his blockade runners.

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William Baker

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Alamo defender, was born in Missouri. He came to Texas as a volunteer from Mississippi during the Texas Revolution. He joined Capt. Thomas F. L. Parrott's company at Bexar on November 26, 1835, and took part in the siege of Bexar. During the subsequent reorganization of the Texan forces he became part of Capt. John Chenoweth's company. Baker left Bexar but returned with the rank of captain as commander of the volunteers accompanying James Bowie on January 19, 1836. He died in the battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836.

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white primary

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The use of white primaries were first used by Southern Democratic Parties in the late 19th century. Since the South was virtually a one-party system with Democrats being the dominant party, exclusion from the primaries was a de facto exclusion from the decision-making process. The white primaries were made law in many states in a "selectively inclusive" system that stated that only whites may vote in the primaries—or by legally considering the general election as the only state-held election and giving the party control of the decision-making process within the party.

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Gail Borden Jr.

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inventor, publisher, surveyor, and founder of the Borden Company; After arriving at Galveston Island on December 24, 1829, he farmed and raised stock in upper Fort Bend County and spent some time in surveying. By February 1830 he had succeeded his brother, Thomas H. Borden, as surveyor for Stephen F. Austin's colony. As early as January 1835 Borden made plans to found a newspaper, but it was October 10 before the first issue of his Telegraph and Texas Register, published in partnership with his brother Thomas and Joseph Baker, appeared in San Felipe. In October and November 1836 he helped lay out the site of Houston. On June 20, 1837, Borden sold his partnership in the Telegraph to Jacob W. Cruger and became the first collector of the port of Galveston under the Republic of Texas. From 1839 to 1851 Borden was secretary and agent for the Galveston City Company. He was a trustee of the Texas Baptist Education Society, which founded Baylor University. When the Civil War brought intensified demand for condensed milk, which he invented, sales grew so much that Borden's success was assured. He also invented processes for condensing various fruit juices, for extract of beef, and for coffee. After the Civil War he established a meat-packing plant at Borden, Texas. In 1873 he built a freedmen's school and a white children's school in Texas, organized a day school and a Sunday school for black children, aided in constructing five churches, maintained two missionaries, and partially supported numerous poorly paid teachers, ministers, and students.

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Sidney Sherman

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soldier and entrepreneur, one of ten children of Micah and Susanna (Frost) Sherman, was born at Marlboro, Massachusetts, on July 23, 1805. Sherman was orphaned at twelve and at sixteen was clerking in a Boston mercantile house. The next year he was in business for himself but failed for lack of capital. He spent five years in New York City; in 1831 he went to Cincinnati. In Newport, Kentucky, across the Ohio from Cincinnati, Sherman formed a company, the first to make cotton bagging by machinery. He was also the first maker of sheet lead west of the Alleghenies. Sherman became a captain of a volunteer company of state militia in Kentucky and in 1835 sold his cotton bagging plant and used the money to equip a company of fifty-two volunteers for the Texas Revolution. The volunteers left for Texas by steamer on the last day of 1835. That they were already regarded as soldiers in the Texas army is shown by a land certificate for 1,280 acres awarded Sherman for services from December 18, 1835, to December 16, 1836. They carried with them the only flag that the Texans had for the battle of San Jacinto. Sherman's volunteers went down the Ohio and the Mississippi and up Red River to Natchitoches, where Sherman was detained by illness. They reached Texas the day before the election for delegates to the Convention of 1836. Sherman's company demanded and received the right to vote. They proceeded to San Felipe, where they were received by Governor Henry Smithqv and Sherman received his command. When Sam Houston organized his first regiment at Gonzales in March 1836, Edward Burleson was made colonel and Sherman lieutenant colonel. The army was reorganized at Groce's Ferry and Sherman, recently promoted to colonel, was given command of the Second Regiment of the Texas Volunteers. On the retreat across Texas, Sherman was eager to fight. At the Colorado he asked permission to recross the river and engage Joaquín Ramirez y Sesma, but his request was refused. On the afternoon of April 20, 1836, the opposing armies faced each other at San Jacinto. Sherman called for volunteers to seize the Mexican cannon, but the weapon was withdrawn. On the following day Sherman commanded the left wing of the Texas army, opened the attack, and has been credited with the battle cry, "Remember the Alamo." After the battle he acted as president of the board of officers that distributed captured property among the soldiers.

President David G. Burnet refused to accept Sherman's resignation when the fighting was over and instead commissioned him as colonel in the regular army and sent him to the United States to raise more troops. After weeks of illness Sherman made his way back to Kentucky and sent troops and clothing back to Texas. His wife, the former Catherine Isabel Cox, returned to Texas with him. They established their home, Mount Vernon, a one-room log house, on a bluff below the San Jacinto battleground. In 1839 the family moved to Cresent Place on San Jacinto Bay. Sherman was Harris County's representative in the Seventh Congress of the republic, serving as chairman of the committee on military affairs. During his term in office he introduced a bill to establish the position of Major General of the Militia and increase protection along the western and southwestern frontiers. In 1843 he was elected major general of militia, a position he held until annexation. It was in his capacity as head of the militia that he presided over the trial of Capt. Edwin W. Moore.

After annexation, Sherman moved to Harrisburg and with the financial support of investors bought the town and the local railroad company. The town was laid out anew, and he organized the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway Company, which constructed the first rail line in the state. In 1852 Sherman was among the passengers when the steamer Farmer burst its boilers; he was saved by clinging to a piece of wreckage. In 1853 the Harrisburg sawmill, owned by Sherman and DeWitt Clinton Harris, was burned. After his residence also burned, Sherman sent his family to Kentucky, and he moved into the railroad office at Harrisburg. Then that office burned. Sherman was keeping the Island City Hotel in Galveston when the Civil War came. Appointed commandant of Galveston by the Secession Convention, he performed his duties ably until he became ill and retired to his home on San Jacinto Bay. A son, Lt. Sidney Sherman, was killed in the battle of Galveston. David Burnet Sherman, the remaining son, died after the family moved to Richmond, and Mrs Sherman died in 1865. Sherman spent his last years in Galveston. He died there at the home of his daughter, Mrs. J. M. O. Menard, on August 1, 1873. Sherman County and the city of Sherman in Grayson County are named in his honor.

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Paul Bremond

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railroad builder, financier, and entrepreneur, was born in New York City on October 11, 1810, to Paul Barlie and Catherine (Green) Bremond of Fishkill, New York. The elder Bremond was a French émigré physician. The younger Bremond left school at the age of twelve to become apprentice to a firm of hatters. He engaged in the hat business in New York and Philadelphia but suffered large losses in the panic of 1837. In 1839 he moved to Galveston, Texas, where he opened an auction and commission house. About 1842 he moved to Houston and expanded his interests, along with the circle of businessmen that included William Marsh Rice, Thomas William House,qqv and William A. Van Alstyne.

Bremond helped to incorporate the Galveston and Red River Railroad, which began construction in 1855. In 1856 the legislature changed the name of the road to Houston and Texas Central, and Bremond, as president, built it north through Hempstead. It was later built through Dallas to Sherman and became one of the major rail lines in the state. Bremond was also involved in the incorporation of the Brazos Plank Road.

He married Harriet Martha Sprouls of New York and with her had a son and two daughters, one of whom, Margaret, was the first wife of William Marsh Rice. Harriet died in 1846, and Bremond then married Mary E. Van Alstyne (daughter of his business partner), by whom he had five daughters. After her death he married the Viscountess Mary Louise de Valernes.

Although most of his family were Episcopalians, Bremond, a spiritualist, organized a Houston society for the study of spiritualism. He believed that he was spiritually guided by Moseley Baker, a soldier of the Texas Revolution. According to Bremond's own story, the spirit of Baker prodded him to build another railroad. He secured a charter in 1875 for the Houston, East and West Texas Railway, to run from Houston to Shreveport through the East Texas piney woods. Though the Houston and Texas Central and most railroads were standard gauge (4' 8"), Bremond now favored a narrow-gauge (3') road, which he thought would be more economical to build and operate. Construction began in 1876 and proceeded slowly. The line reached Livingston in 1879, the site of Lufkin in 1882, and Nacogdoches in 1883. Because local funds and the state land grant did not provide sufficient capital, Bremond mortgaged the railroad to borrow large sums from eastern bankers. The road continued to build north and east to the Sabine River and eventually to a junction with a sister railroad, the Houston and Shreveport, in January 1886. Bremond, however, did not live to see the completion of his work. He died on May 8, 1885, while visiting in Galveston and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery, Houston. The town of Bremond in Robertson County and Bremond streets in Houston, Lufkin, and Nacogdoches are named for him.

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Freedmen's Bureau

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The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established by Congress in March 1865 as a branch of the United States Army. It was to be a temporary agency. Its functions were to provide relief to the thousands of refugees, black and white, who had been left homeless by the Civil War; to supervise affairs related to newly freed slaves in the southern states; and to administer all land abandoned by Confederates or confiscated from them during the war. Federal government established schools for freedmen and voting rights. It was the first social welfare agency of the national government.

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Adele Looscan

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In 1885 Adele Looscan began her long career as a club woman when she founded the Ladies' Reading Club and became its first president. Devoted to the study of history and literature, the club was one of the first women's clubs in Texas. In 1891 she helped to organize the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) and served as historian and chairman of the executive committee for nine years. In 1907 during the annual meeting in Austin, the DRT split into two factions over the control of the Alamo. Adina De Zavala, Adele Looscan and the other women on the executive board were successfully sued by the DRT. Looscan continued to oppose the DRT's proposed use of the Alamo and her argument eventually won. She was also a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was a charter member of the Houston Pen Women, the Texas Woman's Press Association, and the Texas State Historical Association. Looscan served as president of the TSHA from 1915 - 1925. She contributed three articles to Dudley G. Wooten's A Comprehensive History of Texas (1898) and wrote several articles for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly including “Harris County, 1822 - 1845" much of which was drawn from original documents in her possession.

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Ima Hogg

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philanthropist and patron of the arts; She was eight years old when her father was elected governor; She then moved to Houston, where she gave piano lessons to a select group of pupils and helped found the Houston Symphony Orchestra, which played its first concert in June 1913. Miss Ima served as the first vice president of the Houston Symphony Society and became president in 1917. In the meantime, oil had been struck on the Hogg property near West Columbia, Texas, and by the late 1920s Miss Ima was involved in a wide range of philanthropic projects. In 1929 she founded the Houston Child Guidance Center, an agency to provide therapy and counseling for disturbed children and their families. In 1940, with a bequest from her brother Will, who had died in 1930, she established the Hogg Foundation for Mental Hygiene. In 1943 Miss Hogg, a lifelong Democrat, won an election to the Houston school board, where she worked to establish symphony concerts for schoolchildren, to get equal pay for teachers regardless of sex or race, and to set up a painting-to-music program in the public schools. In 1948 she became the first woman president of the Philosophical Society of Texas. Since the 1920s she had been studying and collecting early American art and antiques, and in 1966 she presented her collection and Bayou Bend, the River Oaks mansion she and her brothers had built in 1927, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The Bayou Bend Collection, recognized as one of the finest of its kind, draws thousands of visitors each year.

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Sunbelt City

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shaped by the impact of World War II and by federal funds for military, defense, and other programs. A sunbelt city also featured a "good business climate," a political structure dominated by the downtown business interests and devoted to a "growth ethic," and a high "quality of life."

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frontier city

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A border town is a town close to the boundary between two countries, states or regions. Usually the term implies that it is one of the things the town is most famous for. Border towns can have highly cosmopolitan communities.

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urban city

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The U.S. Census Bureau defines an urban area as: "Core census block groups or blocks that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile (386 per square kilometer) and surrounding census blocks that have an overall density of at least 500 people per square mile (193 per square kilometer)."