Wheaton's Ford on the San Felipe Trail

Wheaton's Ford on the San Felipe Trail. . Hundreds of Anglo American settlers and their enslaved plantation workers of African descent immigrated to Stephen F. Austin's new colony in Coahuila y Texas, Mexico in the early 1820s to raise cotton and sugar cane in the flood plains of the Brazos and Colorado Rivers. In 1830, the colony's Ayuntamiento (colonial council) funded the construction of a new wagon road to transport the colony's cotton via ox wagons from San Felipe to the new port at Harrisburg. This was the first commercial road built by the Texas colonial government. After Harrisburg was burned in 1836 during the Texas Revolution, the new town of Houston became the eastern endpoint of the San Felipe Trail. Its status as a cotton transshipment point was the key commercial catalyst for the city's early growth. , In 1831, colonial empresario Stephen F. Austin granted a league and a labor of land (4,605 acres) at this location to Joel and Elizabeth Wheaton. They established a home and traveler's inn a few hundred feet southeast of the current Highway 6 bridge. At that time this site was an important ford across Buffalo Bayou along the San Felipe Trail. Joel used his team of oxen to help heavily laden ox wagons cross the muddy bayou and climb its steep banks. The Wheatons operated the inn as a traveler's rest and campground, useful during long crossing delays caused by high water. During the Texas Republic era they also raised beef, selling it to passing military units that were raised in Houston for protecting settlers from Comanche raids at the western frontier. In later years, the inn was operated by Mary Jarvis Silliman. When railroads replaced the old trail in the 1870s. William J. Habermacher converted the old inn to a private home. His granddaughter Kate Habermacher lived in it until 1956, when it burned to the ground., Captions , Mexican land grants by 1824 , Joel and Elizabeth Wheaton's inn, as it looked in the 1890s. Note the separate entrances for family and guests. Image courtesy of Marie Neuman Gray. , Ox cart and driver. From Edward King's The Great South, 1875.