Texas City Terminal Railway Company
Texas City, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Minnesota investors and brothers Jacob R. and Henry H. Myers and Augustus B. Wolvin formed the Texas City improvement company in 1893 and developed a port facility and townsite here. By 1897 the company had built a rail spur line linking its port facilities with national railroad systems 4.5 miles inland. Wolvin acquired the company in 1898 and created the separate Texas City company for the townsite and the Texas City Terminal company (TCT) for the railway and docks. He persuaded the U. S. Congress to fund dredging of the channel for ocean-going vessels by 1904 and to designate Texas City as a U. S. port of customs in 1905. TCT official Hugh B. Moore persuaded the Pierce-Fordyce oil refinery company to move to the port industrial area in 1908. He continued to attract oil companies, and by the 1920s oil and petroleum refined products made up over 80 percent of the tonnage handled at the port. The Texas City Terminal railway company provided Texas City its early water, electric, and sewage utility systems and established the community's first telephone, newspaper, and banking operations. Despite a catastrophic 1947 dock explosion, national recession, and hurricane damage in 1983, TCT continued to expand and upgrade its port and rail facilities.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Texas City's terminal railway shows how a private port-and-rail company could conjure an entire industrial city on the Gulf Coast, seeding the refineries that made the region a petroleum powerhouse.
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Related people
- · Augustus B. Wolvin
- · Hugh B. Moore
Related events
- · 1947 Texas City disaster
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
Texas City
Texas City, TX
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.
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.