Aldine
Houston, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The railroad arrived in this area, first called Prairie Switch, in 1873. The Aldine Post Office was established in 1896; twenty-five to thirty families, most of Swedish descent, settled on Aldine's fertile land. Here they grew such products as Satsuma oranges, pears and magnolia figs. In 1900 developer E. C. Robertson and his partner, F. W. Colby of Kansas, began to market parcels of land to out-of-state speculators, many of whom bought tracts sight unseen. A Presbyterian Church was organized from a Union Sabbath School in 1902, and the town began to grow. It soon boasted a hotel and general store, a two-room schoolhouse erected on this site in 1910, and a cemetery deeded for community use in 1911. Aldine resident J. C. Carpenter operated a small fig cannery until 1914 or 1915 when the Carpenter Fig Company opened a cannery nearby. Reportedly one of the largest fig preserving plants in the U. S., it employed twenty-five to thirty people during the canning season. The fig industry died out from 1918 to 1920 because of freezes, blight and lack of sugar during World War I. Dairy farms replaced fruit farms and the Magnolia Oil Company established a large crude oil pumping station in Aldine in 1923. The Aldine Railroad Depot shut down in 1931 or 1932, and the post office closed in January 1935. The community turned to automobiles for transportation. Farmers began marketing their wares in Houston. The town of Aldine gradually declined. In 1932 four area common school districts joined to form the Aldine Independent School District. Now a part of the metropolis of Houston, the townsite of Aldine remains only in the annals of Texas history. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The railroad reached this spot — first called Prairie Switch — in 1873, and a post office followed in 1896 as some two dozen mostly Swedish families settled to grow Satsuma oranges, pears, and figs. Land speculation, a church, a school, and a large fig cannery briefly made Aldine flourish, but freezes, blight, and the sugar shortages of World War I killed the fig industry around 1918–1920. Dairy farms and a Magnolia Oil pumping station replaced the orchards; the depot and post office closed in the 1930s, and Aldine faded into the growing metropolis of Houston.
Why it matters
Aldine traces the full arc of a railroad-born agricultural boomtown — immigration, a specialty-crop economy, and quiet decline — a pattern repeated across turn-of-the-century Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · E. C. Robertson
- · J. C. Carpenter
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Spring
Spring, TX
Platted by the Houston & Great Northern Railroad in 1873, Spring began as a farming community and quickly became a commercial hub and a center of German settlement, with figures like Carl Wunsche shaping its early growth. A new rail line and roundhouse in the early twentieth century turned it into a bustling rail and lumber town, complete with hotels, saloons, an opera house, and a bank. The loss of the roundhouse and the arrival of Prohibition thinned the town in the 1920s, but its school district and German heritage carried it into a renewed boom by the 1970s.
Matthews-Johnson House
Houston, TX
William and Regina Matthews had this Craftsman bungalow built in 1915, hiring the W. T. Carter Lumber and Building Co. to raise a well-detailed house with a hipped roof, L-shaped porch on tapered columns, tracery windows, and exposed rafter ends. William worked as a civil engineer and chief draftsman for the Sunset Central Lines railroad. In 1930 the Johnsons—Ernest, a pumper and labor leader for Sinclair Oil—bought the home and converted the attic into dormered bedrooms for their five daughters.
Houston Infirmary
Houston, TX
Founded in 1874 by two former Confederate Army surgeons, the Houston Infirmary became one of the city's leading hospitals in the decades after the Civil War. It grew alongside the railroads pouring into Houston in the 1870s and 1880s, organizing medical care for their crews and reflecting the era in its segregated wards for white, Black, and Hispanic patients. After nearly forty years and a family dynasty of physicians, competition from a dedicated railway hospital helped bring its closure in 1913.
Horace Dickinson Taylor
Houston, TX
Orphaned as a teenager, Massachusetts-born Horace Dickinson Taylor came to Texas in 1838 and by 1848 had settled in Houston, where he built a thriving cotton brokerage beside a Buffalo Bayou steamboat landing. He raised his family on a wooded homesite here and rose to civic prominence as alderman and, in 1866, mayor. His dredging of the war-neglected bayou revived Houston's commerce and helped the city outcompete Galveston for trade.