diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 17891b90313..03be27657b9 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -181,6 +181,8 @@ Trunk (unreleased changes)
                (Jean-Daniel Cryans via Stack)
    HBASE-740   ThriftServer getting table names incorrectly (Tim Sell via Stack)
    HBASE-742   Rename getMetainfo in HTable as getTableDescriptor
+   HBASE-739   HBaseAdmin.createTable() using old HTableDescription doesn't work
+               (Izaak Rubin via Stack)
 
   IMPROVEMENTS
    HBASE-559   MR example job to count table rows
diff --git a/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/client/UnmodifyableHTableDescriptor.java b/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/client/UnmodifyableHTableDescriptor.java
index 30dced1cc0f..5bdd78dd85f 100644
--- a/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/client/UnmodifyableHTableDescriptor.java
+++ b/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/client/UnmodifyableHTableDescriptor.java
@@ -22,9 +22,13 @@ package org.apache.hadoop.hbase.client;
 
 import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.HColumnDescriptor;
 import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.HTableDescriptor;
-import org.apache.hadoop.hbase.util.Bytes;
 
-class UnmodifyableHTableDescriptor extends HTableDescriptor {
+/**
+ * Read-only table descriptor.
+ * Returned out of {@link HTable.getTableDescriptor}.
+ */
+public class UnmodifyableHTableDescriptor extends HTableDescriptor {
+
   /*
    * Create an unmodifyable copy of an HTableDescriptor
    * @param desc