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Officials develop foundation of port cities
Published October 27, 2008
Stephen F. Austin expected towns at the mouth of the Brazos River to become great port cities, and chose Quintana as part of his own land grant. In 1835 he directed that this property be laid out as a town, prophesying it would develop exponentially as a result of its location.
An article written some years ago by George Kramig, concerning the earliest days of that port, points out that during the early days of the Republic of Texas, such prominent men as the Whartons and Archer formed a development company.
In 1837 they laid out the “city” of Velasco, across the river from Quintana. They expected to reap the advantages when the river’s mouth was developed — to eliminate the troublesome sand bar that was a bane to ships, resulting in a deep water port.
Velasco, which offered the deepest canals and moorings available, was the main port of call for the Texas Navy, which consisted of 12 ships.
Upon Texas’ annexation as a state in 1845, the Texas Navy was transferred to the United States. Even then, Velasco remained the main port of call west of the Mississippi, Kramig wrote.
Actually, if this was the best, some must have had problems, indeed. Sand bars built up at the Brazos River’s mouth, and dozens of accounts by those who came by ship to Velasco at this time recount their recollections of the dangers involved in this part of their passage.
“One morning, quite suddenly, we struck the bar off the mouth of the Brazos River, which gave the vessel such a shock as to throw us all down that were on deck,” one early arrival wrote many years later.
Her account, which appears in “The Journal of Ann Raney Coleman” states the ship struck twice more before finally entering the Brazos River.
“I was very much alarmed, thought we were all going to pieces, at least the ship,” she continued, adding she sprained her ankle as a result of the incident, and although “a German doctor on board” bandaged it, she was unable to walk without a cane for two weeks.
Despite the shifting bars, port operations continued to flourish in the early days, with exports of large crops of cotton and cane shipped to the industrial Northeast, and imports of manufactured products received there, to be stored in warehouses or shipped up the river to Columbia and old Washington.
Shipping to Velasco was so dangerous that insurance companies would not cover cargos shipped there, so wealthy and successful Brazoria merchants Robert and David G. Mills started their own insurance company.
In 1845 the first port improvements began, and in 1857 the Texas Legislature appropriated $60,000 to deepen the channel for 250 miles above the mouth of the Brazos.
The silting continued, however, and shortly before the War Between the States, a canal was dug through the inland waterways from the harbor area to Galveston. This canal was used by stern-wheel steamboats to make regular trips between Galveston and Columbia. Numerous blockade runners made their headquarters along the Brazoria County coast. Confederate forts were located at both Quintana and Velasco to keep the Union blockaders at a safe distance from the mouth, though at least one blockade runner, the Acadia, grounded near San Luis Pass as it attempted to evade a Union ship.
Plans for further development of the Brazos River port were made by the Houston and Texas Central Railroad in 1866, and the company received authorization for the project.
Two rail lines, the Texas Central and International and Great Northern, joined in a new enterprise to construct a jetty at the river’s mouth in 1872, but the area’s plantations had fallen on hard times after the war.
Without slaves, and with no cheap labor available, many area plantations — like others all over the South — failed, eliminating the pressing need for water transportation to the Northeast.
Added to this, a financial panic in 1873 almost shut down the port, and further problems were experienced two years later, when a hurricane destroyed Velasco (then in the location where Surfside is now) and most of the warehouses on both sides of the river, including the shipyard at Quintana.
The lighthouse was completed a mile upstream from the river’s mouth in 1880, and in the early years of that decade Velasco began rebuilding in a less exposed location — 4 miles upstream.
The year of 1880 also was a significant one because of a $40,000 appropriation by the U.S. Congress to begin construction of a jetty.
The Kanter family, whose home and previous experience was in Holland, began the jetty work. After seven years, when expenditures of $142,098 had been recorded, no permanent results were achieved and construction halted.
In the meantime, Kramig said, Congress had approved construction of a jetty at Galveston.
All this was a matter of history by 1888, when Ira H. Evans of Austin, Charles W. Ogden and George W. Angle of San Antonio, and William M.D. Lee of Leavenworth, Kan., agreed to form a company to build jetties 2 miles from the river’s mouth into the Gulf of Mexico.
This was an enormous project in itself, but the developers also planned to dig a channel, provide a world-class harbor and develop the largest city on the Gulf Coast, with railroads, industries and businesses.
Backed by a $1 million investment (a truly staggering sum in 1888), the developers proposed that their company would construct, own and operate “a deep water channel, from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the mainland at the mouth of the Brazos River.”
Next week: Early work on jetties.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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