Highlands, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How the river gave Highlands its name, and how the community has weathered a century of change
More about this in Highlands
Highlands sits along the San Jacinto River and the Houston Ship Channel in eastern Harris County, close enough to Baytown to share a school district but never incorporated into a city of its own. This page is a plain guide to the place — how it got its name, how it grew, and what it's been through — written for anyone who wants the background before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Highlands, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Why it's called Highlands
The name is literal. The east bank of the San Jacinto River, where the community sits, stands at a higher elevation than the river's west bank, and early residents named the place for that simple geographic fact. The railroad followed the name into being an actual town: Highlands became a station on the Beaumont, Sour Lake and Western Railway by 1908, and the community got its own post office in 1929.
A town that tried, twice, to become a city
Highlands incorporated in 1930, but the charter didn't hold, and the community reverted to unincorporated status. A second attempt in 1956 didn't pass either. Highlands has stayed unincorporated ever since, governed as part of Harris County Precinct 3 rather than as its own municipal government — a quieter arrangement than most communities its size settle into.
Boom, bust, and boom again
Highlands' population history reads almost like a business cycle. The community had 20 businesses in the 1930s even as its population slipped from 350 to 200 residents. World War II brought a surge, with military members and war-plant workers filling the area, and by 1948 Highlands counted 3,000 residents and 75 businesses. The 1950s saw local business decline again, dropping the population to 2,723, before another climb to 4,336 residents and 82 businesses in the early 1960s. Local color from that era survives too — W. O. Hutson built the Double Trouble Youth Rodeo Arena here in 1965, and the Stratford Branch Library opened in 1966 on land donated by a local resident named Anna Stratford.
Living with the river
Being named for the San Jacinto River's high bank hasn't spared Highlands from the river's floods. A rain gauge on nearby Cedar Bayou recorded 51.88 inches of rainfall during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, a record at the time for any tropical cyclone anywhere in the continental United States, and the San Jacinto River itself reached record flood levels that same storm. Just two years later, Tropical Storm Imelda pushed the river past flood stage again. With the community's median home built back in 1982, a lot of Highlands housing has now stood through both of those events, and the water is never far away — about a quarter of the community's total area is water, split between the river and the Houston Ship Channel.
Highlands today is still what its name always promised: a community perched just above a river that has shaped nearly everything about how it grew, and how it's had to rebuild. </content>