The area now covered by Houston was first settled by Anglo-Americans before 1826, when a townsite was surveyed for John Richardson Harris, who named the place Harrisburg. An upstate New Yorker who was a member of Stephen F. Austin’s first Texas colony, Harris was granted a league of land—4,428 acres—at the junction of Buffalo and Brays Bayous. One of the first steam sawmills in Texas was built at Harrisburg in 1829, and by 1836 the hamlet also had perhaps twenty houses, most of which were log cabins. [Illustration: the Original Plan of Houston] Harrisburg might have succeeded, and what was to become one of the principal American cities might have been called Harrisburg rather than Houston, but for at least two events besides the death of Harris in 1829. On April 16, 1836, Santa Anna, in hot pursuit of Sam Houston and the Texas army, rode into the almost deserted hamlet and burned it. The second event, the decision of those other upstate New Yorkers, the Allens, to start a town at the most interior point of year-round navigation in Texas, joined with the first to overcome Harrisburg’s ambitions. The Allens and others had eyed the Harrisburg area with shrewd expectations. It was early seen that Buffalo Bayou would become important as an exit route for cotton and other crops grown in the rich agricultural lands along the Brazos River. The Allens first tried to buy the Harrisburg property. But its title was involved in fraudulent claims made against Harris’s estate and they chose a site a few miles farther up the bayou. On August 24 and 26, 1836, they bought the bulk of the John Austin survey, paying $5,000 for half a league and $1 an acre for a league. Thus the original townsite—6,642 acres south of Buffalo Bayou—cost the Allens $9,428. A Main Street corner a few blocks south of the original city was sold in 1940 for $1,150,000; seven years later, or 110 years after the Allens sold the first lots in Houston, Woolworth bought the corner for $3,050,000—or at the rate of $2000 a front inch. On September 30, 1836, the Allens advertised their nonexistent town in the _Telegraph and Texas Register_, saying Houston would become “beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” In October, when Houston was still but a prairie, John Allen made a proposal to the congress of the Republic of Texas, then meeting at Columbia. Move the government to Houston, he said, and the Allens would build a capitol for it. “Capitalists are interested in this town,” the brothers’ petition to congress said of the vacant land, and congress voted to move the government to Houston temporarily. The Allens, having made their town the capital of the republic before the town existed, began building in fact what had succeeded in fancy.