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Chapter One: Before Hermann Park: 1836–1909
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price of land in the future.2 Scanlan’s administration was focused on municipal improvements and modernization. However, he was subsequently criticized for the large amount of money spent on construction of an ambitious new City Hall and Market House in 1872. It burned down without adequate insurance in 1876, exacerbating the city government ’s problems of meeting its financial obligations after the onset of the international economic depression caused by a financial crisis during the Panic of 1873. The city’s substantial debt at this time precluded the purchase of parkland. History of Houston Parks The most significant landscape development in Houston during the Reconstruction period was the establishment of Glenwood Cemetery in 1871 on the north bank of Buffalo Bayou just west of town.3 Although it was private property owned by investors in the Houston Cemetery Company, who purchased 50 acres for the initial cemetery site, in many respects Glenwood became Houston’s first public park. It was planned as a “garden cemetery” with curving lanes and picturesque vistas, a radical departure from Houston’s earlier cemeteries with rows of gravestones laid out in a grid pattern. The streetcar line was extended from downtown to Glenwood, which increased access to its beautiful grounds and made it a destination for middle-class Houston families out for a Sunday picnic. Glenwood Cemetery, for a time, sufficed as Houston’s main public open space. Houston’s only downtown park was Courthouse Square. The three Harris County courthouses, built at intervals between 1837 and 1884, occupied only part of the square, leaving the perimeter of the site for H ermann Park is Houston’s most significant urban space, and its history parallels the development of Houston into a major American city in the twentieth century. Founded in 1836, Houston was superimposed on a flat, grass plain interrupted by forested strips along its streams and bayous. These waterways were, and are, the area’s only natural topographical features, and they determined the physical shape of the city. During the mid-nineteenth century the town remained a frontier settlement, then grew relatively slowly with commerce downtown, residential neighborhoods to the south and west, and railroad and industrial quarters to the north and east. Houston’s early leaders focused their energy and political influence on commercial development and water and rail connections to markets beyond the Houston area. They apparently felt no need to set aside public recreational space, nor was there any city-owned property that could be developed for parks. During the Civil War, Houston’s economy was sustained in part by such clever merchants as William Marsh Rice and T. W. House, who found markets for local cotton in Mexico. Their ships were able to move around Union blockades to the Mexican port of Matamoros. Therefore, after the war, Houston’s economic fortunes rebounded quickly, and Reconstruction was a relatively mild episode focused on political rather than economic recovery. Because local resources were restricted during the war, no construction of consequence took place until the mid-1860s, when building resumed at a rapid pace. Thomas Howe Scanlan (1832–1906), an Irish immigrant, Unionist, and Houston’s Reconstruction mayor, advocated the purchase of land for three municipal parks as early as 1871 to avoid, he said, the high CHAPTER ONE Before Hermann Park 1836–1909 To see cities in terms of their open spaces is to begin to understand their form, their nature, and the dynamic of their economic life.1 —August Heckscher, 1982 4 Chapter One gin, Dowling, Hutchins, and Tuam became available. Prominent Houstonian John F. Dickson,6 in a letter to the editor of the Houston Daily Post in 1910, exhorted the City of Houston to refrain from taking the park for back taxes. In his letter Dickson recounted and defended the history of the Emancipation Park as a place where black citizens had for decades held ownership and celebrated Juneteenth. In this letter he says: “The property was given to the negroes by Marshall C. Wellborn and Sarah J. Wellborn, his wife, on July 10, 1872, to enable them to congregate on their own ground for such amusement and recreation as they desired (much as the Sam Houston park is now used exclusively by whites).”7 In a conflicting story, recorded in 1936, Willie Parker Chestnutt noted: “Growing tired of this procedure [searching every year for a different site to celebrate Juneteenth], in the year 1872, Richard Allen, with public use. The county installed...