10/1/1837: General Land Office opens
On this day in 1837, John P. Borden opened the General Land Office in Houston.
John, with his brother Gail Borden Jr., had surveyed and laid out the town of Houston in 1836. As first commissioner of the new land office, John Borden faced the monumental job of compiling and preserving the many Spanish and Mexican land titles issued before the republic. He began with no funds or employees to assist him, yet by the end of 1837 he had successfully acquired documents from all over Texas. He also registered and surveyed new grants. In 1839 he moved the General Land Office to Austin and transported almost 5,000 pounds of documents by wagon. The military bounties, veteran donations, headrights, and homestead preemptions issued by Borden and successive commissioners amounted to more than 75 million acres granted to individuals.
10/1/1849: The Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville houses its first prisoner
On this day in 1849, the first prisoner, a convicted horse thief from Fayette County, entered the partially completed Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville.
The facility held only three prisoners in 1849, but by 1855 it housed seventy-five convicts, and by 1860, 182. In 2018 there were six prison units and a prison transfer facility located in the city of Huntsville, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice was responsible for more than 146,000 adult inmates at units throughout the state.
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