Happy 180th Birthday, Houston: City celebrates at Sam Houston Park

Two Yankee proprietors set out on a bold aspiration 180 years ago this week to found a city in the knee-deep mud of southeast Texas. They banked their boat at an opportune sandbar, where White Oak and Buffalo bayous converge, and named the place Houston.

A few blocks from that spot, Houstonians gathered Sunday to reflect and pay homage to the monumental progress that nearly two centuries have brought.

"From 1836 to where we are today, Houston has come a long, long way," said Mayor Sylvester Turner, addressing several dozen people gathered downtown on the lawn of Sam Houston Park.

Who would have thought, he asked, that a miserable swamp village could so swiftly become a modern metropolis of millions, the national petroleum industry capital and a destination for families from every continent.

This region wasn't always so.

When the Allen Brothers founded Houston on Aug. 30, 1836, they stood in a vast landscape of shallow standing water, where the native Karankawa lived smeared with gator fat and dirt to ward of the mosquito swarms that would often spread devastating epidemics through the soggy, fledgling town. Several early visitors to Houston were appalled at the hardship and discomfort poised by the terrain.

But Houston persisted. Through the resilience of frontier people and the use of slave labor, the city would battle hurricanes and floods to put roads atop the mud, and grow Houston into the biggest city of the American South.

That story offers inspiring lessons in hard work, strong will and perseverance, said R.W. McKinney II, who chaired the Sunday event and runs a history education program for local youth called Young Houstorians.

"There are so many characters to learn from," he said, from Jesse Jones whose real estate firm built most of early 20th Century Houston, to Jack Yates, a former-slave-turned-local-community-organizer who built a school for black children in Houston 20 years after emancipation.

McKinney said he was disappointed when he found there were no plans to celebrate the 180th birthday, so he headed the operation for the Heritage Society, which is headquartered in Sam Houston Park. Sunday was the Society's first such birthday celebration for the city.

The 20-acre park – Houston's oldest municipal park – made a fitting venue for the party. Guests gathered among a collection of meticulously transplanted and preserved old wooden buildings, including the Yates home and a brick house built on that spot in the 1840s.

Charles Cook, 60, said he recalled when the Yates home was moved from the Fourth Ward to Sam Houston Park in 1994, and was excited for his first chance to step inside Sunday. Cook is a native Houstonian and vice president of the Descendents of Olive Wood Cemetery, a historic black graveyard in the Heights.

He said learning local history helps each generation avoid repeating past mistakes.

"Sometimes we live in the city and don't know anything about it," he said. "I want to know about the Hispanic side, about all sides of the city."

The mayor echoed that sentiment as he proclaimed the day an official birthday holiday, and advised that Houstonians "reflect on the accomplishments that make our city so great."

"Remember to dream big as the founders did 180 years ago," he said. "The best for this city is yet to come."