Beaumont, county seat of Jefferson County, the largest city and western-most point of the Golden Triangle of southeast Texas, was platted in 1835 for New Orleans apothecaries Henry W. Millard and Joseph P. Pulsifer and Jasper County merchant Thomas B. Huling....
Anahuac is a small town on the northeast shore of Trinity Bay, near the point where the Trinity River empties into the bay. It grew up in the second quarter of the nineteenth century adjacent to a short-lived Mexican fort, built at this strategic...
Liberty, county seat of Liberty County, was platted in 1831 on the east bank of the Trinity River by surveyor José Francisco Madero and his associate José María de Jesús Carbajal. La Villa de la Santísima Trinidad de la Libertad lay just south of...
Baytown is an amalgam of the towns of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Baytown, which formed along the north shore of Galveston Bay after the Humble Oil and Refining Company (now ExxonMobil) built its first refinery in Baytown in 1919–1920, facing the newly opened Houston...
Pasadena is the capital of the Houston Ship Channel, which forms the city's northern boundary. The fifty-four-mile-long Houston Ship Channel is the eighth-largest seaport in the world, the second-largest seaport in the United States in terms of total tonnage, and...
Deer Park fills in the coastal plain between the east edge of Pasadena and the west edge of La Porte. A railroad-related agricultural development of 1892, Deer Park did not come into its own until 1928 when Shell Oil Company established its oil...
Bay Ridge in the town of Morgan's Point is the oldest example of a coastal resort community in Texas. Situated just south of Morgan's Point, where the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou empty into Galveston Bay, Bay Ridge began to be developed in 1893...
Clear Lake City is a master-planned community, the largest in a series of suburban developments that began to populate the north shore of formerly rural Clear Lake following the U.S. government's establishment here in 1961 of the National Aeronautics and...
Webster was begun in 1879 as an agricultural community alongside the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad tracks. It is most famous for being the place where Seito Saibara, a former member of the Japanese Diet and former president of Dashisha University in...
Friendswood was founded in 1895 along lower Clear Creek by members of the Estacado Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends, a congregation of Quaker farming families who had come to Texas from the Midwest. The opening of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center...
Texas City was developed in 1893 on a ten-thousand-acre tract that three brothers from Duluth, Minnesota, Jacob, Henry, and Benjamin F. Myers, and their partner A. B. Wolvin bought at Shoal Point, on the mainland across Galveston Bay from Galveston Island....
Galveston, county seat of Galveston County, was founded in 1838 by the Galveston City Company on the northeast tip of Galveston Island, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. The harbor of Galveston Bay, adjacent to the northeast tip of the island, had been...
Angleton, county seat of Brazoria County, was founded in 1890 by two investors living in Brenham: Faustino Kiber, a Swiss immigrant and wholesale confectioner, and lawyer Lewis Randolph Bryan, a Brazoria County native and great-nephew of Stephen F. Austin. It...
Freeport was developed in 1912–1913 by the Freeport Townsite Company, an affiliate of the Freeport Sulphur Company, both controlled by Texas-born, New York City bankers Eric P. and Swen A. Swenson, sons of Swedish immigrant S. M. Swenson, who came to Brazoria...
Lake Jackson was founded in 1941 by the Dow Chemical Company as a planned new town to house the employees of the magnesium and styrene plants Dow constructed in Freeport, five miles to the southeast. Freeport, Velasco, and Angleton discouraged...
Brazoria is a small town on the west bank of the lower Brazos River. It was founded in 1828 by John Austin, one of Stephen F. Austin's initial “Old 300” Anglo-American immigrant settlers, and was county seat first of the Ayuntamiento de Brazoria,...
West Columbia comprises two towns, East Columbia (originally named Marion but also called Bell's Landing and, from the 1840s, East Columbia) and West Columbia (originally called Columbia, and eventually absorbing East Columbia), both founded by one of...
Rosenberg was founded in 1883 by the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway (GC&SF) on the south bank of the Brazos River, southwest of Richmond, at Rosenberg Junction where the GC&SF intersected the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway. Rosenberg...
Richmond, county seat of Fort Bend County, was laid out in 1837 by two merchants from Brazoria, Robert Eden Handy and William Lusk, on the west bank of the Brazos River, just downstream from Fort Bend. An early party of participants in Stephen F. Austin's...
Sugar Land is, after Houston, Pasadena, Beaumont, and Baytown, the fifth-largest city on the upper Texas Gulf Coast. What makes this statistic remarkable is that Sugar Land hardly appears to be a city at all. It is a patchwork quilt of settlements that...
Stafford, now a suburb of Houston, began as a stop on the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway, which commenced service in 1853. It takes its name from Stafford's Point, the plantation of William Stafford, one of Stephen F. Austin's 300 settlers....
The county seat of Wharton County, Wharton was founded in 1847 on a ridge between the east bank of the Colorado River and Caney Creek. A fifteen-block townsite was surveyed by Virgil Stewart and W. J. E. Heard for the three sons of William Kincheloe, to whom...
Egypt represents the survival of a rural community that never coalesced into a formally surveyed town. In 1824 Stephen F. Austin awarded title to a league of land on the east bank of the Colorado River to John C. Clark, who had settled here in 1822. Egypt, which...
Glen Flora lies near the east bank of the Colorado River, just upstream from its confluence with Caney Creek. The town was platted in 1900 in connection with the construction of the Cane Belt Railroad, which was built to provide transportation to the sugar...
Boling was platted in 1900 on Caney Creek alongside the tracks of the Cane Belt Railroad. Boling metamorphosed into a real town when the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company acquired mineral rights to five thousand acres at the Boling Dome in 1922 and began sulfur...
Pierce was platted in 1894 along the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway line as a sixty-four-block townsite by the largest cattle rancher along the lower Colorado River, Abel H. Pierce, better known as Shanghai Pierce. Ranching in Wharton, Matagorda, and Jackson...
El Campo, the largest town in Wharton County, was platted in 1892 along the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway, although settlement had begun here in the 1880s at what had been a switching stop and cattle shipment point for Wharton County ranches west of the...
Danevang is, like Egypt, a rural community rather than a town. The community's name is Danish for “Danish field.” It was settled in 1894 under the auspices of the Danish Peoples Society, which facilitated the transfer of Danish immigrant farm families from the...
Bay City, county seat of Matagorda County, was platted in 1894 by the Bay City Town Company near the geographic center of the county for the purpose of supplanting the coastal town of Matagorda, twenty-two miles south, as the county seat. David Swickheimer,...
Matagorda lies on the east bank of the Colorado River just north of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The town was platted in 1829 by Elias Wightman, Hosea H. League, James E. B. Austin, Thomas M. Duke, and William Selkirk after Stephen F. Austin secured from...
