City of Baytown
Baytown, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located in the Gulf Coast region and situated mostly within Harris County plus a small portion of Chambers County, the city of Baytown is bordered by eight bays: Burnet, Crystal, Scott, Mitchell, Black Duck, San Jacinto, Tabbs and Galveston Bay. The first residents in the area were Indian tribes known as the Attakapas, Akokisa, Bisai and Karankawas, utilizing the waterways for transportation and food. Pioneers began to settle the area in 1822, gathering near Lynch's Ferry on the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou. Other ferries included Cedar Bayou Ferry, Durain Ferry near Busch's Landing on Goose Creek and the Morgan's Point Ferry. Rice farming and brickyards using high-quality clay found in the riverbeds and streams further developed the area throughout the 19th century. During the Texas Revolution, the Lynchburg Volunteers organized to serve the cause, as well as during the Civil War with the Bayland Guards. Men and women from Baytown continue to serve their country. In 1908, an oil boom spurred the rapid development of the communities of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Bay Town that became one community known as Baytown at consolidation in 1948. The Goose Creek Oilfield (1903) is known as one of the first offshore drilling operations in the nation, attracting others to the oil business. The area transformed into a desirable residential area with recognized schools, libraries, churches, recreation, business and industry. Baytown's rich history and heritage in the transportation, oil, military and agricultural industries contributed to the development of Baytown and eastern Harris County. (2018)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Baytown's arc from Indian waterways to ferry crossings to a Ship Channel oil town compresses the whole industrial story of the upper Texas coast into one place.
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Related events
- · Goose Creek Oilfield discovery
- · Texas Revolution
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
New Washington
Morgan's Point, TX
At the junction of Buffalo Bayou and San Jacinto Bay, Philadelphia-born Colonel James Morgan bought 1,600 acres in 1835 and laid out New Washington, working as merchant, land agent, and civic leader. Mexican troops burned the town during the Texas Revolution while Morgan served as a colonel, but it was rebuilt and flourished until nearby Houston outgrew it. Morgan's 1850s dream of a navigable channel along Buffalo Bayou was realized in 1876 when steamship magnate Charles Morgan dredged the Houston Ship Channel; the town, now Morgan's Point, was incorporated in 1949.
Old River
Old River-Winfree, TX
Old River, a looping channel of the Trinity, drew some of the earliest pioneers to this corner of southeast Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, among them Robert and Eleanor Wiseman on land grants taken up in 1827. Fertile soil and open grassland made it a farming and ranching center whose hides, timber, and charcoal were shipped down to market in Galveston. That trade fostered shipbuilding firms, brick kilns, and ferry operations, seeding a pattern of settlement whose descendants still live in the area.
Wooster Community
Baytown, TX
In late 1892 two families from Mapleton, Iowa — the Woosters and the Crows — bought over 1,000 acres in the old Nathaniel Lynch league on the Harris County bay shore, soon joined by the Browns. For a generation nearly everyone in Wooster was kin to those three households, until the 1919 opening of the Humble Refinery pulled the sleepy farm settlement into the orbit of Gulf Coast oil. The community grew through 1920s and 1930s subdivisions, hosted a WWII holding camp for German POWs, and was annexed by Baytown in 1962. Battered by subsidence and the hurricanes Carla and Alicia, and later bought out for a refinery greenbelt, Wooster today has all but vanished into the Baytown Nature Center.
La Porte
La Porte, TX
A group of Colorado land developers formed the La Porte Land and Town Company in 1890, bought over a thousand acres, and began selling lots to settlers lured from New York and the Midwest. A railroad reached the Sylvan Beach Resort in 1899, and the beach joined agriculture as the town's economic mainstay. Storms in 1900 and 1915, a nearby oil strike in 1916, and post–World War II industrialization steadily reshaped La Porte from a farming and resort town into part of the greater Houston industrial coast.