GALVESTON, TEXAS
Texas, it’s been said, is rich in unredeemed dreams. If only in that respect, Galveston is perhaps richer than most places.
Possessing one of the long, flat Texas coast’s few openings to the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston’s promise as an economic center was obvious—it had been designated a provisional port of entry in 1825 by the Mexican government and was incorporated by the Republic of Texas in 1839, six years before Texas joined the Union. No less an authority than Stephen F. Austin declared Galveston the “best natural harbor the colony of Texas has to offer.”
By the end of the 19th century, Galveston was the world’s leading port for cotton exports and the third-busiest port overall in the United States. A description of the port, observed and documented several decades later in the WPA Guide to Texas, gives some sense of the humming activity:
Seen from the wharves, the harbor, protected by artificial moles, is alive with traffic from a hundred ports; grimy tramp steamers, sluggish, wallowing oil tankers, trim passenger ships crowd the docks; bustling, self-important tugs nose among the larger vessels, thrusting a fruit ship out to sea, edging a steamer gingerly to dock. Here is one of the largest cotton ports in the world, where thousands of men are employed to load cotton for foreign destinations, and to handle the yellow cargoes of sulfur and grain which compose a large proportion of the exports. Heavy imports of bananas from the tropics, jute bagging from India, raw sugar from Cuba and elsewhere for refining in Texas, find their way into the harbor. More than half a hundred coastwise and foreign ship companies make Galveston a regular port of call. — Texas, A Guide To the Lone Star State (WPA, 1940)
Opulent new hotels along the waterfront, opera houses and other monuments to the island’s newfound prosperity were being erected. Galveston became the first place in Texas with working electricity and telephone service. The city of 37,000, in short, looked ready to become the Southwest’s gateway to the world, and no end to its potential. But on Sept. 8, 1900, Galveston’s course changed forever. On that day, a hurricane of exceptional ferocity made landfall, killing more than 6,000 people—possibly as many as 12,000—in what is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
Sixteen-foot high stormwaters washed over the island, most of which was just above sea level, destroying 3,600 homes. Isaac Cline, the U.S. Weather Service’s top meteorologist in Galveston who rode across the beach on horseback warning of the coming calamity only to be ignored by residents, wrote in his memoirs, “In reality, there was no island, just the ocean with houses standing out of the waves which rolled between them.”
After the flood, everything had to be razed 15 blocks from the coast. The buildings that survived were mostly the ones placed as far inland as the island’s narrow geography permitted. Bodies not swept out to sea were gathered for burning on immense pyres, which continued for weeks after the storm.
Many left Galveston permanently after the hurricane, but not everyone. Those that remained set about rebuilding the city, and one of the first tasks was constructing protection from future storms. A 3.3-mile concrete seawall was finished by 1904 and extended years later:
Viewed from the air above the Gulf of Mexico, rippling waves wash a smooth, wide, sandy beach, above which looms a solid gray wall of tremendous proportions, grimly guarding the city against its old enemy, the sea. — Texas, A Guide To the Lone Star State (WPA, 1940)
Nonetheless, Galveston sustained damage more serious and permanent than even its physical destruction. Fifty miles inland, Houston’s businessmen and civic leaders saw an opportunity in Galveston’s misfortune and successfully agitated to dredge a deepwater channel that would open Houston to the massive container ships that had previously stopped in Galveston. Snaking through mainland Texas for miles, the channel would offer far more protection from the weather than Galveston could, and it was completed in 1914. Houston became America’s busiest port and the wealth of a city blossomed around it.
It may be naïve to think that, were it not for the hurricane, Galveston today would have Houston’s money and influence. The island is only 27 miles long and no more than three miles wide at its thickest, necessarily capping its growth potential. With Houston’s emergence as a major port, tourism—and for a period in the early 20th century, vice—became Galveston’s main industry.
The city never fully recovered from the storm of 1900. A walk cross the sleepy island today reveals many gleaming new homes and hotels along the waterfront, but also many derelict buildings eaten away by the salty sea air and neglect. It is hard to imagine these ruins standing for long in a more prosperous place.
Still, one senses no small amount of pride in Galveston. It has been bloodied, but it survives. Plaques in buildings throughout the city mark a line where the water level crested during the last major storm, Hurricane Ike in 2008. It’s hard not to feel a certain awe for the residents, since those markers are an unspoken reminder of the thousands of determined hours spent gutting, rehabilitating and restoring the city.
Among those who stayed after the great storm of 1900 a century ago, the attitude was much the same:
As Maj. Robert Lowe, manager of the Galveston Daily News, responded to a suggestion by a Dallas journalist to print the paper in Houston, “You would, would you? Well I won’t,” he shouted. “You never lived here. You don’t know — and you would ask me to desert? No, no, no. This paper lives or dies with this town. We’ll build it again and The News will help.” The newspaper did not miss an issue. — Galveston by David G. McComb (2000)
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Michael Marchio is a State Guide to Texas. (Photographs by Anne Herman.)