La Marque, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Buttermilk Junction became La Marque, and how the town fought to stay its own city
More about this in La Marque
La Marque sits about 12 miles northwest of Galveston in northwestern Galveston County, right along Interstate 45 between Houston and the island. The town has gone by three names in its history, and its identity as an independent city was never a given — it was, for decades, the largest unincorporated community in Texas before residents fought to keep it that way in 1953. 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 La Marque, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
From Buttermilk Junction to La Marque
The settlement that became La Marque was first called Highlands, likely for its spot near Highland Creek. During the Civil War, soldiers traveling the route between Galveston and Houston stopped there often enough to buy buttermilk that locals started calling it Buttermilk Junction. The town took its current name in the 1890s, after residents learned another Texas community already used the name Highlands. The choice fell to Madam St. Ambrose, a French Catholic Ursuline Sister serving as postmistress, who picked La Marque — French for "the mark."
Built by the railroads, then by the refineries
By 1914, four separate rail lines reached La Marque: the International and Great Northern, the Galveston, Houston and Henderson, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, and the Interurban electric line. That kind of rail access was rare for a town its size, and it set up La Marque's population to reach 500 that year. As the petrochemical industry expanded along the bay through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, La Marque took on a new role: a residential town where the administrative, trades and crafts workforce supporting the Texas City refineries next door could live.
The fight to stay independent
That growth made La Marque, by the early 1950s, the largest unincorporated residential community in the entire state of Texas. Neighboring Texas City moved to annex it in September 1953, and the attempt failed after La Marque residents organized and voted to incorporate as their own city instead, keeping La Marque a separate town from its larger industrial neighbor to this day.
A population that rose, fell, and rose again
La Marque's population didn't grow in a straight line the way many Houston-area suburbs did. It stood at 17,000 in 1977, then fell to 15,697 by 1988 and 14,258 by 1991, before climbing back to 13,682 by the 2000 census and 18,030 by 2020. Part of that later chapter includes the closing of the town's own school district — La Marque Independent School District had its accreditation formally revoked after a 2015 review found a pattern of poor academic ratings, and its students were absorbed by the Texas City, Dickinson, Hitchcock and Santa Fe districts in 2016.
The town today
La Marque's climate leans more tropical than most of Texas, with high humidity and heavy, frequent rain most of the year. The city is the hometown of former U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, one of the state's best-known political figures. You can find current information through the City of La Marque government website.
That is La Marque: a town renamed twice before it settled on a French phrase for "the mark," built up by refinery workers commuting next door, and kept independent only because its residents chose, in 1953, not to be swallowed by their bigger neighbor. </content>