Wooster Community
Baytown, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Wooster was founded by Quincy Adams Wooster and Willard D. Crow, who came here from Mapleton, Iowa, with their families late in 1892 and purchased more than 1,000 acres in the Nathaniel Lynch league. Junius Brown, also from Monona County, Iowa, bought adjacent land a few weeks later, and moved his family here in 1893. Until the Humble Refinery opened in 1919, most residents of the area were related to these three families. Wooster and Crow originally platted the town of Wooster on their land in January 1893, but the community actually developed in the early 1920s on Brown's land in the James Strange labor. Wooster existed for a long time as a pleasant rural community. Its business district, located on Market Street Road (now Bayway Drive) near Wooster Street, included grocery stores, cafes, a service station, churches, schools, a volunteer fire department, and a chamber of commerce. Much of the town's economy was connected to the oil refinery. The Wooster-Crow land was first developed with the opening of two new residential subdivisions of Wooster: Wooster Heights in 1930 and Brownwood in 1937. During WWII, the area hosted a temporary holding camp for German POWs. Baytown's repeated attempts to annex Wooster succeeded in 1962. Today the Wooster community is nearly gone, having succumbed to the forces of both nature and progress. Much of Brownwood is submerged due to extensive subsidence and the devastation of hurricanes Carla and Alicia; all remaining homes have been removed and the area is now the Baytown Nature Center. Between 1999 and 2007, ExxonMobil purchased almost all of the homes in Wooster and Wooster Terrace to create a greenbelt around the refinery; however, the Wooster Heights and Lakewood subdivisions remain intact. (2015)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
Wooster's arc — Midwestern homesteaders, a boomtown refinery, and finally erasure by storm, subsidence, and industrial buyout — captures how the twentieth-century petroleum economy remade and then consumed the small communities of the Texas Gulf Coast.
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Related people
- · Quincy Adams Wooster
- · Willard D. Crow
- · Junius Brown
Related events
- · Opening of the Humble Refinery, 1919
- · Baytown annexation of Wooster, 1962
Themes & tags
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