Wards of Houston

When the city of Houston was founded in 1836 and incorporated in 1837, its founders—John Kirby Allen and Augustus Chapman Allen—divided it into political geographic districts called "wards".

Though the surveyors chose the Harris County Courthouse as the geographical center of Houston, the ward boundaries were formed by two axes converging at the corner of Main and Congress Streets.

These resulted in four pie-shaped wards, almost identical in size, numbering clockwise from the northwest quadrant.

Candidates for alderman were limited to white, male, Texas-citizens, and furthermore, were subject to requirements to have nominal tenure of residency and real estate holdings in the city.

[3] After slavery ended in Texas in June 1865, ex-slaves were forced to live in separate enclaves within each of Houston's wards.

Freed slaves developed Freedmen's Town in a 5 square miles (13 km2) area in the Fourth Ward.

[5] In 2018 the street artist Dual made a mural representing Produce Row on the Main & Co. Building in Downtown.

The new political division was bounded by Buffalo Bayou to the south, Washington Avenue to the north, and Glenwood Cemetery from the west to the city limits.

A 1975 Houston Post article said that the corruption that had been discovered led voters to politically neuter the wards via an election on December 10, 1904.

After 1928 other landmarks such as Memorial Park and River Oaks appeared in place of the wards as reference points.