The San Jacinto Monument rises 567.31 feet from the coastal plain, making it the tallest memorial column in the world, surpassing even the Washington Monument by more than twelve feet and the Juche Tower in North Korea by nearly ten. Constructed between 1936 and 1939 to mark the centennial of the battle, it is crowned by a 220-ton star symbolizing the Lone Star Republic. Visitors ride an elevator to the observation deck, where the panorama stretches from the tanker-choked Houston Ship Channel to the skyscrapers of downtown Houston sixteen miles to the west. Inside the base, the San Jacinto Museum traces Texan culture from Mayan and Spanish roots through the revolution and the Republic, while the 160-seat Jesse H. Jones Theatre screens a film on the battle. The monument's scale matches the outsized mythology Texans attach to San Jacinto, the place where their state's identity was forged in a single explosive afternoon.

Preserving the battleground began in the 1880s, when the State of Texas purchased ten acres along Buffalo Bayou ahead of the revolution's fiftieth anniversary. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas lobbied the legislature for more, and in 1897 Senator Waller Thomas Burns of Houston secured $10,000 to establish a public park. That money bought an additional 336 acres of battlefield land. By 1907, another $25,000 in state appropriations went to improvements, and the site was officially designated San Jacinto State Park, making it the first state park in Texas. The park saw further upgrades before Houston hosted the 1928 Democratic National Convention, cementing its place as a civic landmark. What started as a modest ten-acre memorial purchase grew into one of the most significant historical preserves in the American South.

Anchored near the monument for decades was the USS Texas (BB-35), the last surviving dreadnought battleship in the world. Launched in 1912 and commissioned in 1914, the Texas served in both World Wars, shelling the beaches at Normandy on D-Day and earning five battle stars in the Pacific. In 1948, the Texas Legislature established the Battleship Texas Commission, and after a $225,000 journey from Baltimore, the ship arrived at San Jacinto on April 20, 1948, one day before the anniversary of the battle. She was turned over to the State of Texas on April 21, becoming the first battleship memorial museum in the nation and the commissioned flagship of the Texas Navy. The battleship has since moved to Galveston for a major $60 million restoration, but her long tenure at San Jacinto added a twentieth-century layer of military heritage to an already hallowed site.

The battleground faces an enemy no monument can defeat: the earth itself. Underground water extraction has triggered severe land subsidence along the Galveston Bay shoreline, particularly in the Baytown-Pasadena corridor. Since the early twentieth century, portions of the original battlefield have slipped beneath the bay, slowly erasing the very terrain where Houston's soldiers charged. Seawall repairs funded by a $2.6 million U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant have shored up some of the erosion, but the landscape that visitors walk today is measurably smaller than the one the Texan army crossed in 1836. It is a sobering reminder that even sacred ground is subject to geology, and that the effort to preserve history here is as much about engineering as memory.