City of Hitchcock
Hitchcock, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In region held before 1820s by Karankawa Indians, and afterwards by cattle raisers. The Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway built through the area in 1870s, naming station for Galveston civic leader and late landowner, Lent Munson Hitchcock (1810-1869). On the railway, George Henckel in 1880s opened a produce commission house. Leaders among fruit and vegetable growers included Emil and Hypolite Perthius, H. M. Stringfellow, and Jacques Tacquard. Stores, a butcher shop, bakery, hotel, and saloons were established. The townsite was platted and public school opened 1894. Churches were active. St. Mary's (later Our Lady of Lourdes) Catholic parish had first house of worship. A building for Protestants, soon a Methodist church, was erected 1894. Other faiths arrived later. After 1920, truck farming declined; packing houses closed. In 1930s, local men found work in Texas City. A Coast Auxiliary Army Replacement Center opened here in 1940; it later became Camp Wallace, an anti-aircraft training center. A blimp base was operated 1941-45, for surveillance against enemy submarines. Hitchcock remains a center of small business and industry, with modern homes on garden acreage owned and occupied by urban and industrial workers.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Once Karankawa country and later open cattle range, this stretch of Galveston County gained a town when the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway pushed through in the 1870s and named the station for civic leader Lent Munson Hitchcock. Truck farmers turned it into a fruit-and-vegetable center with stores, churches, and a school by the 1890s, until farming declined and men found work in nearby Texas City. World War II brought the biggest change of all: Camp Wallace trained anti-aircraft crews here, and a blimp base flew submarine patrols over the Gulf from 1941 to 1945.
Why it matters
Hitchcock's story runs from Indigenous ground through railroad-era agriculture to a wartime training and coastal-defense hub, mirroring how World War II transformed sleepy Gulf Coast towns.
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Related people
- · Lent Munson Hitchcock
Related events
- · World War II
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hitchcock Depot
Hitchcock, TX
By local tradition, the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad won its right-of-way through Emily Hitchcock's land in 1875 by promising a depot bearing her late husband's name. The railroad platted the town of Hitchcock in 1891, and the depot that opened by 1893 became a hub where passengers, freight, and farm produce all passed through. The last surviving GCSF depot in the area, it was moved to this spot in 1975 and turned into a museum in 1982.
Alta Loma
Santa Fe, TX
Named with the Spanish for "high land," Alta Loma rose on the gently swelling ground of inland Galveston County. In 1893 an investment company platted a townsite along a Santa Fe rail line and installed water, electric, and telephone systems to draw settlers, many of whom planted orchards and truck farms. Battered by the great 1900 storm, the town rebuilt and thrived on farming and dairying before its residents drifted toward Texas City's oil jobs; in 1978 it merged with Arcadia to form the city of Santa Fe.
La Marque
La Marque, TX
The settlement that became La Marque grew from an 1838 Republic of Texas land grant along Highland Bayou, then boomed when the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad linked the two cities in 1860. A post office arrived in 1869, and by 1900 the community had settled on the French-flavored name La Marque, thriving on dairy farming and an interurban electric line to Houston. When the petrochemical industry rose along Galveston Bay in the mid-20th century, La Marque reinvented itself as a bedroom community for industrial workers, incorporating in 1953 after resisting annexation by neighboring Texas City.
Dairy Industry in the Santa Fe Area
Santa Fe, TX
The railroad hamlets of Arcadia, Alta Loma, and Algoa sprang up in the 1890s, and by the turn of the century their economy ran on citrus, figs, truck farming, and a fast-growing dairy trade. Creameries shipped butter and milk to Galveston and Houston by rail, and by the 1920s dairying was so common that, as locals told it, nearly everyone kept a cow. Stock laws, consolidation, and the postwar drift of workers to city jobs slowly squeezed the small operators, and the last Santa Fe-area dairy closed in the 1970s.