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Camp Chemical cramped, chaotic
Published October 12, 2009
The changes Dow brought to Brazoria County were no greater than those newcomers faced when they arrived in what they considered an alien atmosphere.
Robbie Suttle Coker, who wrote of her impressions in Dan Kessner’s “Memories of the Brazosport Area from the 1940s and ’50s,” came here from what she called “my beautiful East Texas with its pine trees, sand hills and live oaks.”
When she arrived in Brazoria County, she was greeted “by rain, mud, flat land and hordes of mosquitoes.”
She remembered, “The smells were worse than any outhouse I’d been in, and 58 years ago there had been many.”
The house she referred to as her family’s “little shack” was located off Clute’s Main Street on what now is called Mansfield Street.
“You didn’t have to be embarrassed that you lived in a shack,” she said, explaining in those years in the Brazosport area, people rented anything they could, with some even having to sleep in their cars.
After a few months, her family moved to Camp Chemical, where they lived in a one-room house with a pole in the middle and a light bulb.
“Clute looked good compared to this place,” she said. “Every block had its own bathhouse, boys on one side, girls on the other.”
On the first day of school, Robbie’s mother walked with her, and they picked out landmarks to help her remember the way home.
It had rained all day, though, and the standing water made it difficult to follow her landmarks. Like a great many others in Camp Chemical’s history, she got lost. Her mother finally found her a couple of streets over from their home.
Sometime later, Robbie’s family moved into a barracks building, which she described as a long apartment house. “Boy, were we uptown, because we had a flushing toilet,” she recalled.
The clothesline was out back, but vigilance was necessary when the washing was hung out to dry, because occasionally someone stole clothes off the line.
“This only happened to us once,” she said. “If that little 4-foot, 10-inch mother could have gotten to the thieves, they would have wanted a policeman.”
Another of the former Camp Chemical residents was Marcus Stephenson, who remembered the closest residence his father could originally find after beginning work at Dow was in Guy.
He drove to and from work daily, and described the drive to his family, including mention “on a couple of occasions” having to wait while an alligator crossed Highway 36 between West Columbia and Brazoria.
When Stephenson and the rest of the family joined his father in this area, they planned to live a 30-foot trailer house his dad had built from two-by-fours and plywood.
“As soon as he had finished, he gathered all the spare tires he could find and we headed to our new home in Freeport,” Stephenson said.
Perhaps fortunately, they weren’t aware that the extreme weight of the trailer would cause them to blow out a tire about every 75 miles.
When their rig reached Pearland, they could not find any more tires due to rationing, so they pulled the trailer into someone’s yard, loaded their personal items and continued their journey, but to Camp Chemical rather than to Freeport.
He remembers their tiny cabin at Camp Chemical as being “bare, with only a sink/cold water in one corner.” He asked his parents whether they were going to sleep in a barn, and “Sure enough we threw our mattresses on the floor and we slept the first night in our new home.”
Stephenson said his father built bed frames from two-by-fours the next day, and his mother put a curtain around the bottom of the sink to provide a place for her pots and pans.
“There was very little other furniture, as the available room would not allow much of anything,” he said. “Mother did have her Singer sewing machine so we knew we likely would have a new shirt once in awhile.”
When the 1942 school year began, Stephenson and his best friend, Bessie Downs, carried their lunch pails and joined about 30 other students in Mrs. Wessie Parks’ first-grade class.
“In between our lessons after lunch we each took a piece of ‘butcher paper,’ laid it on the wood floor” and either took a nap or rested for 30 minutes or so, he said.
Looking back on this time, Stephenson commented, “I suspect our lying down had more to do with Mrs. Parks resting than us,” even though he described her as “a saint of a lady” that he was privileged to know in his adult life.
As for life in Camp Chemical, he remembered it was “exciting, to say the least.” There was abundant mud in that rainy time, streets were shelled but mostly dirt, and communication was by radio, since the only phone was a coin-operated one at the store.
“Entertainment included going to the store on payday and watching the activities, which sometimes included fist fights between those that might have had too much to drink,” Stephenson said.
Refreshments — for the kids, at least — included a 5 cent investment for a soft drink that had been placed in the ice cream box so it would freeze. When opened the frozen drink would push out the top like a “popsicle,” he said.
The Stephenson family, like most other residents, found more spacious places to live after a year. At that time, his family moved into an old 14-foot trailer they moved to the trailer camp.
He noted Dow’s trailer camp “was divided into two sections.” One was for those who owned their own trailers. The other, which was where the A.P. Beutel Building is now located, was the site on which the federal government had set up hundreds of green trailers available for rent.
Life for those who lived in the trailer parks “was very pleasant, as Dow furnished recreation and entertainment, including Thursday night movies for all,” Stephenson said. “We even had assigned plots of land to be used as ‘victory gardens.’”
Next week: Magazine finds humor in Freeport boom.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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