Thomas Henry Borden

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you were to stand in Galveston and look around at the streets, the lots, the orderly grid of a city that rose up out of a barrier island, you might wonder who first had the nerve to draw those lines. Well, the marker on this site points to one man.

Thomas Henry Borden. Born in Norwich, New York, on January 28, 1804, he came to Texas and planted himself so deep in its story that you can't tell the early chapters without him. He was one of the Old Three Hundred, that select company of settlers who came into Stephen F.

Austin's colonies. Think about that for a moment. The Old Three Hundred.

Not a big number. Not a crowd. The kind of number where everybody knows everybody, and history knows all of them.

Borden was among them. And he didn't stop there. He surveyed the town of Galveston.

The town you're driving through, or near, right now. Somebody had to walk that ground, measure it, map it, decide where one thing ended and another began. That was part of Thomas Henry Borden's work.

But here's what really sets the man apart in my mind. In 1835, he became an editor and one of the founders of the Telegraph and Texas Register. A newspaper.

In 1835. Texas wasn't even a republic yet, and this man was already making sure there'd be a record of what was happening. The Telegraph and Texas Register.

The kind of name that sounds like it was built to carry weight, and it was. He helped build it, helped give it a voice, right here at the edge of everything. Thomas Henry Borden lived in Galveston until March 17, 1877, and this is the site where his home stood.

The surveyor, the editor, the founder, one of the three hundred. The lines he drew and the words he printed outlasted him, and that's not nothing. That's the whole game.

What the marker says

Site of the home of Thomas Henry Borden one of the "Old Three Hundred" of Austin's colonies. Surveyed the town of Galveston. Editor and one of the founders in 1835 of the "Telegraph and Texas Register. Born in Norwich, New York, January 28, 1804;died in Galveston, Texas March 17, 1877.