James Pickney Henderson

In 1937 a statue of San Augustinian James Pickney Henderson, first Governor of Texas, was erected in front of the courthouse.

Henderson arrived in Texas in the spring of 1836, and was at once sent back to the United States by President Burnet to enlist aid for the Republic.

He recruited two companies of volunteers to serve in the Texas Army, one of which he forwarded at his own expense.

Returning to Texas in 1837 he was made Attorney General by President Houston, later succeeding Stephen F. Austin as Secretary of State.

In the spring of 1837 he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to England and France, with power to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce with those nations, and to secure official recognition of Texas’ Independence. He returned in 1839, and declining any further public office, retired to private life and the practice of law.

He married Miss Frances Cox in 1839, and the couple built a handsome colonial house in the southern part of the town, where they lived from 1840 to 1856. A marker is placed on the site on South Liberty Street.

Henderson practiced law in a firm with Thomas J. Rusk of Nacogdoches and Kenneth L. Anderson of San Augustine. In 1845 he was sent from San Augustine to the constitutional convention for the state, and while there he decided to offer himself for election as first governor of the new state, to which office he was elected.

Henderson served under General Taylor in the Mexican war, and assumed the office of governor at the close of that war. He declined reelection at the end of his term, and returned to the private practice of law.

He went to Washington as a Texas state senator in the fall of 1857. His health failed rapidly, and on his return to Washington in 1858, after a winter spent in Cuba, he developed pneumonia and died June 4, 1859.