Kemah, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Kemah got its name, its boardwalk years, and the bay it has always sat beside
More about this in Kemah
Kemah sits in the northeastern corner of Galveston County along west Galveston Bay, a city of under two square miles that has spent two centuries changing names and industries while never moving off the same stretch of shoreline. This page is a plain guide to that place, written for anyone who wants to understand the town before they read anything else on this site. For the full record, the Kemah, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
The land under Kemah was first granted to a colonist named Michael Gouldrich on August 24, 1824, and changed hands several times over the following decades before the Bradford and Kipp families portioned it into town lots in 1898, giving it the name Evergreen. The area went by another name too in those years — Shell Siding, for the oyster shell middens that lined the bay, in places 20 to 30 feet deep, a reminder of just how much shellfish and salt water had already shaped this ground before anyone built a house on it.
Getting a post office meant getting a new name, since a town called Evergreen already existed elsewhere in Texas. In 1907, the town took the name Kemah, a Karankawa word meaning "wind in my face," and John H. Kipp Sr. opened the post office under that name.
The casino years and the boardwalk that followed
Kemah's most colorful chapter ran from the 1920s to the 1950s, when investment from the Maceo crime family, which ran much of Galveston's vice trade during that period, built a lavish casino district along the town's boardwalk. Venues with names like the Chili Bowl and the Kemah Den drew crowds until the state Attorney General and the Texas Rangers finally shut the operation down in the 1950s.
The town didn't stay quiet for long. A commercial shrimp fishing fleet took hold in Kemah in the 1950s once the Clear Creek Channel opened, giving the local economy a working-water identity that outlasted the casinos. Tourism found its way back in the 1970s, helped along by the Johnson Space Center on nearby Clear Lake, as pleasure boats began filling the water. By the late 1990s, Landry's Restaurants had opened the Kemah Boardwalk, and the transformation was complete enough that by 2012 Kemah was ranked the top tourism spot in the Greater Houston area.
How the city became a city
Kemah adopted Vernon's Texas Civil Statutes and formally became a General Law City on October 22, 1966, a fairly late formal incorporation for a settlement with roots running back to the 1820s. That timeline says something about Kemah's character: a place that operated as a fishing town, then a casino town, long before it operated as a conventional municipal government.
The schools and the water
Pupils in Kemah attend Clear Creek Independent School District, zoned to Stewart Elementary School, Bayside Intermediate School, and Clear Falls High School, none of which sit inside the small city itself. You can see the district for yourself through the Clear Creek Independent School District website. The City of Kemah government's own pages spend real space on flood protection and storm preparation, a sign of how central Galveston Bay remains to daily life here, in the same way it has been central to every chapter of the town's history, from the shell middens to the shrimp fleet to the boardwalk.
That is Kemah: a stretch of bay-front land that has been a farm grant, a shell-lined fishing village, a casino strip, a shrimping port, and now a boardwalk tourist town, always defined by the same water at its edge.