They had already hired Gail and Thomas Borden, publishers of the _Telegraph and Texas Register_ and also surveyors, to stake out the town. Gail, a notable figure in early Texas history, would later make his fortune by inventing a process for condensing milk. But the Bordens were busy in Columbia, where their newspaper was then published, and most of the surveying was done by Moses Lapham, a young Ohioan who worked for the Bordens. He began staking out the town early in October, 1836. When he finished seven weeks later, the Bordens announced in their newspaper, “We have at length, and almost without the use of mechanical instruments, completed a plan for the City of HOUSTON....” The historian Joe B. Frantz could find no record of what the Allens paid Lapham or the Bordens for surveying Houston. “From the extant record,” Frantz wrote, “it would appear that Lapham received only a bad case of chills, for which he drank ‘heavy draugts (_sic_) of black pepper and sassafras tea.’” Two years later, while surveying near San Antonio for Samuel Maverick, Lapham was scalped by Indians. Like one of the city’s founders, the man who laid out Houston is buried elsewhere, in San Antonio. The original city was laid out from Buffalo Bayou on the north to, but not including, Texas Avenue on the south, and on the west from the bend in the bayou behind the Music Hall to, but not including, Crawford Street on the east. The east-west streets were laid out roughly parallel with the bayou and thus do not lie on a true east-west line but are many degrees off the compass. Writing in 1958, Andrew Forest Muir showed that January 19, 1837, marks the beginning of Houston. “With the exception of one lot that had been sold on January 1, 1837, the first purchases were made on January 19, which is probably the most reasonable date to mark the beginning of the city of Houston as such,” he wrote. “Early in January, 1837, the town was so devoid of an existence that Francis Richard Lubbock with a party in a yawl passed the townsite without realizing it.” [Illustration: _Neighbors: the First Methodist Church, completed in 1910, and the Texas National Bank Building, completed in 1955._] Even in the beginning the property was astonishingly valuable, so much so that some land was sold in 12½ foot lots. Indeed, lots are said to have been sold for as much as $10,000, but Muir found nothing during the town’s first six months to substantiate that. Examining all the conveyances of record through June 20, 1837, he found only one lot that sold for $5,000 and another for $3,000. Most of them sold for no more than $500. But $500 was a considerable price for a small piece of virtually unimproved village land in 1837, even in a new republic’s temporary capital.