Though the Allens’ town would become one of the leading cities of North America, though it would one day be abashed by a legend of riches, neither profited much for his pains. John Allen died in Houston two years after buying the land. Augustus lived until 1864, but he left Houston in 1850 after signing over to his wife Charlotte most of his remaining interests. Of this trio, only Charlotte was to profit from the Texas city conceived by New Yorkers. Living to a great age, she still owned Houston land when she died at her home, now the site of the Gulf Building, on August 3, 1895. Augustus Allen lived always on the verge of success. In poor health most of his life, he was early a bookworm, a taste which may have led to his first job, when he was seventeen, as a mathematics teacher in upstate New York. In 1827, when he was twenty-one, he moved to New York City, where he was first a bookkeeper and then a partner in H. and H. Canfield Company. Five years later he and John, who had joined him in New York in 1829, moved to Texas, eventually settling in Nacogdoches. With other speculators, the pair dealt in Mexican land titles. They began their Houston venture soon after Texas won its independence. [Illustration: _The capitol of the Republic of Texas, 1837-39, now the site of the Rice Hotel._] Little seems to be known of Augustus’ life during the fifteen years he lived in Houston. No doubt that owes less to mystery than to the prosaic nature of selling real estate. But some mystery does surround his separation from Charlotte in 1850. The land for Houston had been bought with money Mrs. Allen had inherited from her father, and in time she became dissatisfied with her husband’s management of the property. They separated but did not get a divorce, “both husband and wife pledging to keep the details of their troubles secret,” Amelia W. Williams has written. They seem to have succeeded. Ill, and surely once more disappointed in his luck, Augustus moved again, this time to Mexico, where he and the Mexican leader Benito Juarez became friends. In 1852 he was appointed United States consul for the Pacific port of Tehuantepec, and in 1858 he was also given the same post at the port of Minatitlan on the Gulf side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. During these years he and a Briton developed what is thought to have been a successful shipping concern. In 1864, apparently realizing that he was critically ill, he went to Washington to resign his consulships. There he died of pneumonia on June 11, less than a month before his fifty-ninth birthday. He died without ever returning to the city he and his brother conceived. Augustus was buried in Brooklyn; only one of the city’s founders, John Allen, is buried in Houston.