Huntsville: Sam Houston's Last Home and Texas's First Prison

Huntsville was founded in eighteen thirty-six by two brothers from Alabama, Ephraim and Pleasant Gray, who named it after their hometown. It was a quiet East Texas town until two of the most consequential institutions in Texas history attached themselves to it: the home of Sam Houston and the first prison in the state.

Sam Houston arrived in eighteen forty-seven, bought land, and built a house he called the Woodland Home. He had already lived several lives by then. He had been a congressman and governor of Tennessee, President of the Republic of Texas, a United States Senator, and the commander who defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto in eighteen thirty-six. He came to Huntsville seeking quiet. He found, instead, the last chapter of a turbulent public career. When Texas voted to secede in eighteen sixty-one, Houston, alone among Southern governors, refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy and was removed from office. He came home to Huntsville, and on July twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-three, he died there. He is buried at Oakwood Cemetery, his grave marked since nineteen eleven by a ten-foot granite monument carved by sculptor Pompeo Coppini.

The Texas State Penitentiary opened here in eighteen forty-nine, just one year after the legislature created the prison system. The choice of Huntsville was not accidental. Houston's presence in town, and the local community's donation of rock and timber for construction, made a persuasive case to the committee. The original prison became known as the Walls Unit, named for the fifteen-foot brick wall enclosing its yard, and it remains in operation today.

Huntsville is now the administrative capital of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which operates more prisons within a short radius of this town than almost anywhere in the country. The Texas Prison Museum tells that story with exhibits including an electric chair known as Old Sparky, which was used in executions from nineteen twenty-four to nineteen sixty-four.

Two legacies define this town. One built the republic. The other has been incarcerating its citizens ever since.