Baytown Post Office
Baytown, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1936-37 as the Goose Creek Post Office, this structure served as the area's main postal facility for almost fifty years. Designed by architect Louis a. Simon, the early international style building features an interior fresco mural commissioned as part of the Federal Arts Program of the Works Progress Administration. After the post office moved from this building in 1985, it became the home of the Baytown Historical Museum. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1988
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1936–37 as the Goose Creek Post Office, this building anchored the area's mail service for nearly fifty years and still holds an interior fresco commissioned through the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Program. Designed by supervising architect Louis A. Simon in a restrained modern style, it reflected the federal building boom of the Depression era. When the post office relocated in 1985, the structure found new life as the Baytown Historical Museum.
Why it matters
It is a tangible piece of the New Deal, when federal dollars built civic architecture and put artists to work decorating the public square.
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Related people
- · Louis A. Simon
Related events
- · Works Progress Administration
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
City of Baytown
Baytown, TX
Set among eight bays on the Gulf Coast, the land that became Baytown was home to the Attakapa, Akokisa, Bidai, and Karankawa peoples before Anglo pioneers gathered near Lynch's Ferry in 1822. Rice farms and clay brickyards built up the area through the 1800s, and the discovery of the Goose Creek Oilfield in 1903 — remembered as one of the nation's first offshore drilling ventures — triggered an oil boom that fused the towns of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Bay Town into a single city at consolidation in 1948.
K'Nesseth Israel Synagogue
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The Goose Creek oil boom of the early 20th century swelled the population around Baytown, and in 1928 twenty founding members organized the K'Nesseth Israel congregation to serve the area's Jewish families. They hired Houston architect Leonard Gabert, whose 1930 synagogue featured a barrel-vaulted roof, round-headed stained glass, and an arched brick entry.
The Baytown Sun
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The Baytown Sun grew from the Goose Creek Gasser, a weekly launched in 1919 just as an oil refinery began transforming the tri-cities of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Baytown. Through a chain of mergers and renamings—driven partly by the Great Depression—rival papers combined into a single daily, which took the name The Baytown Sun after the three towns consolidated in 1948. Expanding presses and rising circulation tracked the community's growth from oil-boom camps into a permanent city.
Robert E. Lee High School
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When oil transformed the Goose Creek field after 1908, the booming tri-cities of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Baytown needed a school to match, and in 1928 architect Harry D. Payne delivered a striking Art Deco building. Named Robert E. Lee High School in an era when the Confederate general's memory was widely honored locally, it became the civic heart of the district, hosting churches, clubs, and even a junior college's night classes. It survived an arson fire in 1987, restored by alumni to its original appearance.