Beauxart Gardens
Nederland, Jefferson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Named for its location between Beaumont and Port Arthur, Beauxart Gardens was developed during the Great Depression by the U.S. Government as a federal subsistence homestead colony under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. The act encouraged urban and rural workers to supplement their incomes through agriculture. Residents worked part-time at area refineries and kept gardens and livestock. One of five such colonies in Texas, Beauxart Gardens was located on fertile rice land and provided a total of 50 families with a house and acreage. In 1934, the U.S. Government bought 205 acres of land from Frank D. and Lillian Mabry and Ed and Mary Mittie for the creation of Beauxart Gardens. Plans included homesteads of approximately 2.5 to 4.5 acres, two dedicated parks, two shelled public roads and a community center, all protected by fence and cattle guards. Residents purchased homesteads for an average of $3000, payable over a period of forty years. In addition to a modest frame home, each homestead included a combination garage and cow barn and a chicken house. The federal government transferred title to the Beauxart Homestead Association in 1936 but continued to provide agricultural and related instruction during the Depression. The Beauxart Homestead Association maintained its oversight of the community’s development, and the community center was the location of frequent civic and social activities. In 1942 it became the polling place for a new voting precinct at Beauxart Gardens. Today, Beauxart Gardens retains its identity as a successful New Deal program.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Beauxart Gardens—its name blending Beaumont and Port Arthur—was a federal subsistence homestead colony created under the New Deal's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. One of five such colonies in Texas, it settled fifty families on 2.5-to-4.5-acre plots of fertile rice land, where residents worked part-time at area refineries while keeping gardens and livestock. The government transferred title to a homestead association in 1936, and the community—with its parks, roads, and community center—still retains its New Deal identity.
Why it matters
Beauxart Gardens is a rare surviving example of the New Deal's experiment in subsistence homesteading, meant to steady working families through the Great Depression with a house, land, and a garden.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Beauxart Gardens was born out of the hardest years the country has known. The Great Depression of the 1930s threw millions out of work and left even those with jobs stretched thin, and it hit industrial and rural workers alike. In Southeast Texas, refinery hands and laborers felt the squeeze along with everyone else.
Washington's answer was the New Deal, a sweeping series of programs meant to put people back to work and to steady families against the storm. One strand of that effort was strikingly experimental: the idea that ordinary working families might weather hard times better if they were given not just relief checks but a house, a patch of land, and the means to grow some of their own food. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 authorized exactly this kind of subsistence homestead, run through a federal Division of Subsistence Homesteads.
The name itself captures the setting. Beauxart Gardens sat on fertile former rice land between Beaumont and Port Arthur, and its name was stitched together from those two cities. This was refinery country, and the plan was to root working families in it more securely.
People & events
The idea was practical and hopeful at once: residents would keep their part-time jobs at the area refineries while also working gardens and raising livestock on their own ground, so that a paycheck and a plot of land together could carry a family through lean times. Beauxart Gardens was one of five such colonies in Texas, and it was built for fifty families.
The machinery of it is spelled out in the record. In 1934 the federal government bought 205 acres, purchased from Frank D. and Lillian Mabry and from Ed and Mary Mittie, to create the colony. The land was laid out into homesteads of roughly two and a half to four and a half acres each, along with two parks, two shelled public roads, and a community center, all enclosed by fence and cattle guards. Families bought their homesteads for an average of about three thousand dollars, paid off over a stretch of forty years.
Each homestead was a small working farm in miniature. There was a modest frame house, a combination garage and cow barn, and a chicken house, everything a family needed to keep a garden and a few animals. In 1936 the government transferred the title to the residents own Beauxart Homestead Association, though it kept offering agricultural instruction through the Depression years. The community center became the hub of civic and social life, and by 1942 the settlement had grown established enough to serve as the polling place for a new voting precinct.
Its place in the American story
Beauxart Gardens is a rare, tangible survivor of one of the New Deal's boldest social experiments. The subsistence homestead program grew out of a genuinely radical question for its time: instead of simply handing out relief, could the government resettle struggling families onto land where they could partly provide for themselves? Colonies of this kind were tried in a number of states, tied at various points to the broader resettlement efforts of the era.
Many such experiments were controversial and short-lived, criticized as costly or utopian. What makes Beauxart Gardens notable is that it worked well enough to endure. The transfer of title to a homeowners association in 1936 marks the moment the federal experiment handed itself over to the people living it, and the community held together and kept its identity long after the emergency that created it had passed.
It is also a window into how differently Americans once imagined the safety net. The vision here was not a check in the mail but a house, a few acres, a cow, and a chicken coop, the belief that dignity and security came from land and self-reliance. Standing in a neighborhood that began as a federal blueprint for surviving the Depression, you are looking at the New Deal not as history in a textbook but as a place people still call home.
If you visit
Come here understanding that Beauxart Gardens is a living neighborhood, not a museum, so this is a respectful drive-through rather than a place to wander through yards. The families here are the direct heirs of an eighty-year-old experiment, and the best way to appreciate it is with a light footprint and an eye for the layout.
As you drive the shelled-turned-paved roads, notice the generous spacing of the lots. This was never a tight subdivision; it was designed around homesteads of several acres so each family could garden and keep animals. That unusual roominess, the gardens, the outbuildings, and the sense of small farms rather than city blocks is the physical signature of the subsistence-homestead idea, and it is still legible if you know to look for it.
Set between Beaumont and Port Arthur, it makes a thoughtful counterpoint to the region's oil-and-refinery story. The same refineries that drew the world's attention also gave these families the part-time paychecks that made the colony work. Pause at the marker, picture the community center full of neighbors on a 1930s evening, and consider how a hopeful federal experiment quietly succeeded and simply became home.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Great Depression
- · New Deal
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Early Texas Oil Pipelines
Port Arthur, TX
This marks the route of Texas' first oil pipelines to tidewater, built in 1901 to carry crude from the famous Spindletop gusher that came in on January 10 of that year. A company that would become Gulf Pipeline laid eleven miles of line to the railroad in just two weeks, then extended it to Port Arthur, and within a few years the region was laced with hundreds of miles of pipe. The marker also recalls the wartime 'Big Inch' line from Texas to the Atlantic as a decisive factor in Allied victory in World War II.
Spindletop to Port Arthur Oil Pipeline Corridor
Port Arthur, TX
On January 10, 1901, the Lucas Gusher blew in at Spindletop near Beaumont, flowing at an estimated 100,000 barrels a day and launching the Texas oil boom. To move that flood of crude, the Port Arthur Townsite and Land Company deeded a pipeline right-of-way to James Guffey and John Galey, whose line fed a refinery that became the Gulf Refining Company of Texas. Within three years more than 500 miles of pipeline crossed southeast Texas, and the corridor helped make Port Arthur a major refining and shipping center.
The Lucas Gusher
Beaumont, TX
On January 10, 1901, a well drilled under Captain Anthony F. Lucas atop a salt-dome hill called Spindletop blew in with unimaginable force, spewing an estimated 100,000 barrels of oil a day from just over 1,000 feet down. The Lucas Gusher was the first great well of the Gulf Coast, and it instantly transformed Beaumont into a boomtown and the Sabine district into a world center of oil refining and export. It touched off the age of cheap, abundant petroleum in America.
Texas Company Refinery at Port Arthur (Port Arthur Works)
Port Arthur, TX
Days after the January 1901 Spindletop gusher, oilmen J. S. Cullinan, Arnold Schlaet, and former governor James S. Hogg's group formed the Texas Fuel Company, soon reorganized as the Texas Company. Its Port Arthur Works began with two tar stills in 1903 and its first crude still that November, and here innovations like thermal cracking and, during World War II, fluid catalytic cracking for high-octane gasoline and synthetic rubber were perfected. Renamed Texaco in 1959, it is the only surviving company born of the Spindletop boom.