Texas City
Texas City, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This community traces its origin to settlement by a few families along the bayshore in the mid-1800s. Completion in 1854 of the Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse, a Federal project near the present day Texas City Dike, hastened the formation of a village which in 1878 added a post office under the name Shoal Point. In 1891-1892 Minnesota investors chose Shoal Point as the future site of a port and industrial center and asked their friend Frank Davison to manage the venture. By the end of 1893 the town, renamed Texas City, had a hotel, railroad station, post office, and a 6-mile-long channel project underway. Despite delays created by the 1900 storm, an enlarged channel capable of receiving ocean going vessels was completed by 1905. Construction of a tank farm in 1920 initiated decades of oil refining and petrochemical industrial development. The city's rapid growth in the late 1930s and during World War Ii was briefly interrupted by the disastrous port explosions of 1947. Nevertheless, during the 1950s the city's population almost doubled to 32,000 people as the local economy responded to a surge in worldwide demand for oil by-products. By 1992 Texas City was Galveston County's largest mainland city.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Texas City grew from a handful of bayshore families in the mid-1800s into a shipping and industrial powerhouse. A federal lighthouse in 1854 drew a village first called Shoal Point; then in the early 1890s Minnesota investors and manager Frank Davison reimagined it as a deepwater port, dredging a ship channel finished by 1905. A 1920 tank farm launched decades of oil refining, and despite the devastating 1947 port explosions the city's petrochemical economy doubled its population in the 1950s.
Why it matters
Texas City charts the arc of the Gulf Coast's transformation into one of America's great petrochemical and shipping hubs—triumph, disaster, and all.
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Related people
- · Frank Davison
Related events
- · Texas City disaster of 1947
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Texas City Terminal Railway Company
Texas City, TX
In 1893 Minnesota investors — brothers Jacob and Henry Myers with Augustus B. Wolvin — founded a company to build a port and townsite here, linking their docks to the national rail network by 1897. Wolvin reorganized the venture, won federal funding to dredge a deep-water channel by 1904, and secured Texas City's designation as a customs port in 1905. As official Hugh B. Moore drew oil refiners to the industrial district, petroleum came to dominate the port's traffic, and the railway also supplied the young community's first utilities, telephone, newspaper, and bank — enduring even the catastrophic 1947 dock explosion.
Texas City Dike
Texas City, TX
When Texas City's early boosters cut a ship channel straight across Galveston Bay's natural water line — against engineers' advice — currents kept silting it up. The answer was the Texas City Dike, authorized in the 1913 Rivers and Harbors Act and completed in 1915 under the Army Corps of Engineers to deflect the bay's waters and keep the channel clear. Extended to 5.4 miles by 1934, the dike protected a busy shipping lane and later became a beloved local spot for fishing, boating, and bait shops.
The Texas City Disaster
Texas City, TX
On the morning of April 16, 1947, a fire aboard the cargo ship Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer bound for a recovering postwar Europe, drew crowds of spectators to the Texas City docks. At 9:12 a.m. the ship detonated with a force felt for miles, and a second explosion the next day destroyed still more. More than 550 people died, including 27 firemen, and thousands were injured by flying concrete, steel, and glass. The Red Cross led an immediate relief effort, and the tragedy drove sweeping reforms in industrial safety and emergency medicine.
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.