Dickinson, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a bayou settlement grew, shrank, and grew again on the way to becoming a city
More about this in Dickinson
Dickinson sits in Galveston County, about 28 miles southeast of downtown Houston and 19 miles northwest of Galveston, on a tract of land granted to John Dickinson in 1824. A settlement had taken hold on the bayou that carries his name shortly before 1850, but the city that exists today wasn't incorporated until more than a century later. This page is a plain guide to that town, written for anyone who wants the background before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Dickinson, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
Dickinson owes its early growth to the railroad. The Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad was built straight through the settlement in 1857, one of the earliest chartered rail lines in Texas, and that same line was later used during the Civil War to help retake Galveston from Union forces. In the 1890s, the Dickinson Land and Improvement Association began marketing the area to farmers and to Galveston socialites alike, building attractions like the Dickinson Picnic Grounds to draw visitors out from the island.
An unusual chapter: Italian immigrants and a Prohibition-era casino town
Dickinson's early twentieth century brought two chapters most Houston-area suburbs don't share. In 1905, the Italian ambassador to the United States, Baron Mayor des Planches, convinced roughly 150 Italians from crowded eastern cities to resettle in Dickinson, joining others who'd already relocated there after flooding drove them out of Bryan, Texas. Then, in the 1920s, the Maceo crime syndicate that controlled Galveston's gambling and nightlife during that era invested heavily in Dickinson, building gambling venues including the Silver Moon casino and turning the small town into a real tourist draw.
A population that rose, fell, and rose again
Unlike suburbs that simply grew every decade, Dickinson's population has moved in waves. An oilfield near the town in 1934 and the Calumet Penreco mineral-oil plant in 1942 helped push the population to a peak of 12,161 by 1970. It then fell to 9,497 by 1990, before the growth of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in neighboring Webster, which opened in 1962, helped drive the numbers back up — to 17,093 by the 2000 census and 20,847 by 2020. The City of Dickinson itself wasn't incorporated until 1977, when it already had roughly 11,000 residents, making it a city that existed in practice long before it existed on paper.
A history shaped by water
Dickinson Bayou runs through the middle of the city, and the town's history is tied to it in both good times and bad. The bayou gave the settlement its name and its early economy, but it has also been the source of repeated flooding. Hurricane Ike's storm surge in 2008 pushed water in from Galveston Bay and flooded neighborhoods along the bayou. Then, in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded roughly 90 percent of the city, seriously damaging more than 7,000 homes and 88 businesses. The city's current flood maps, redrawn in 2019, still follow the bayou and its tributaries closely.
Local color and recent history
Dickinson has produced a mix of well-known names, from NASA flight director Gene Kranz to venture capitalist Bill Gurley, both natives of the city. More recently, Dickinson drew national attention in January 2021 when a tied mayoral runoff election, 1,010 votes each, was decided by drawing a name out of a hat. The city's government center, a combined city hall and library complex, was dedicated in 2009 on Highway 3, the same corridor that runs through much of the town's commercial core. You can find current information through the City of Dickinson government website.
That is Dickinson: a bayou settlement more than 170 years old that only became an official city in 1977, shaped as much by its unusual early history and its population's rise and fall as by the water that has both built it up and, more than once, flooded it. </content>