Notes

However, the problem of transporting goods to market and travel remained acute. Three additional railroad charters were granted by the Republic of Texas to run from Galveston Bay, from Harrisburg, and from Houston to the Brazos Valley. Two of the companies, the Brazos and Galveston Rail-road and the Harrisburg and Brazos Rail Road, were tied to real-estate promotion schemes. Although all three companies awarded contracts, none was able to construct a railroad. The Harrisburg and Brazos, subsequently chartered as the Harrisburg Rail Road and Trading Company with Andrew Briscoe as its first president, graded about two miles and made other efforts to construct a railroad before it, too, ended in failure. However, the Harrisburg project was the precursor for the first successful railroad in Texas. In early 1847 Gen. Sidney Sherman acquired the Harrisburg town lots and surrounding land from Briscoe and his associates, and later that year he was successful in attracting northern capital to his project. This led to the chartering of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway Company on February 11, 1850. Among the other incorporators were William Marsh Rice and John Grant Tod, Sr., from Texas, and Bostonians Jonathan F. Barrett, Elisha H. Allen, and John Angier. Work on this railroad began in 1851, and the first locomotive, named for Sherman, arrived in late 1852. The initial twenty-mile segment from Harrisburg (now a part of Houston) and Stafford's Point (now Stafford) opened by September 7, 1853. The Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado was not only the first railroad to operate in Texas, it was the second railroad west of the Mississippi River and the oldest component of the present Southern Pacific.