Vicinity of Oyster Creek and Chocolate Bayou
Alvin, Brazoria County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Most early Texas homes and towns were built along streams that provided water for people and livestock, and travel for boats said to be capable of "floating on a heavy dew". Oyster Creek served, 1822-1861, as such a homesite-highway. Its boat landings were piled high with sugar, cotton, cane and other products of some of America's richest plantations. Chocolate Bayou was an area of early-day cattle raising. These were 2 of 50 streams and 10 bays that made this coast a network of useful waterways. (1968)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the decades after Anglo settlement began in 1822, the sluggish coastal streams of the Texas Gulf plain doubled as highways. Oyster Creek carried shallow-draft boats said to float "on a heavy dew," and its landings piled high with sugar, cotton, and cane from some of the era's richest plantations, while Chocolate Bayou anchored early cattle raising. Together they were two threads in a web of some fifty streams and ten bays that knit the coast into a working network of waterways.
Why it matters
Before railroads, these creeks and bayous were the arteries of the plantation economy, showing how geography dictated where early Texans settled and how they moved their wealth to market.
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Themes & tags
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