Santa Fe, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How Alta Loma, Arcadia and Algoa became one Galveston County city
More about this in Santa Fe
Santa Fe sits in Galveston County, about 35 miles south of downtown Houston and 20 miles northwest of the city of Galveston. It's a town made of three older towns, all born along the same railroad line, that eventually decided to become one city rather than be absorbed piece by piece into a neighbor. For the full record, the Santa Fe, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Three towns along one railroad
Before there was a Santa Fe, there was Alta Loma, Arcadia and Algoa — three small settlements that grew up along the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway, built through the area in the late 1870s. The Alta Loma Investment and Improvement Company platted the Alta Loma townsite in 1883, and the settlement's post office opened in 1894 after James W. Skirvin led the first group of settlers there. Each of the three towns stayed its own small place for decades, tied together mainly by the rail line that ran between them and gave the future city its name.
Water out of the ground
Long before anyone thought about a shared water utility, Alta Loma was known for its artesian wells. The first one came in around 1895, and by 1897 roughly 30 wells in the area were producing about 6,000,000 gallons of fresh water a day — enough that much of it was piped to Galveston, a city that has never had much fresh groundwater of its own. That natural water supply is part of why farming took hold here as early as it did.
Citrus, dairy and rice
The local economy through the early 1900s ran on citrus and fig orchards, truck farming, and a dairy industry that grew fast enough to matter regionally. By 1912, creameries operating at Alta Loma and Arcadia were shipping large quantities of butter and milk to markets in both Houston and Galveston. Rice farming joined the mix by the 1920s. Automation helped the area's dairies hang on through the 1950s, but the last one in the Santa Fe area closed its doors in the 1970s as workers left farm jobs for better pay in the city.
Becoming one city
The three communities took their first real step toward becoming one place in 1928, when Alta Loma, Arcadia and Algoa combined into the county's first consolidated school district, naming the joint high school Santa Fe after the railroad that had linked them from the start. Incorporation as an actual city came decades later, on January 21, 1978, after neighboring Hitchcock tried to annex part of Alta Loma and residents petitioned instead to form their own city. Santa Fe has since grown to include all of Arcadia and part of Algoa. You can find current city services through the City of Santa Fe website.
The land itself
Santa Fe sits low and flat, on a coastal plain that runs between about 19 and 27 feet above sea level. Highland Bayou and Halls Bayou, the two waterways that drain the city, both flow southeastward into West Bay, and because the ground has so little natural slope, the city relies on an extensive network of drainage ditches, culverts and diversionary canals to keep water moving during heavy rain. Population has grown slowly and steadily rather than in sudden bursts, from 12,222 residents at the 2010 census to 12,735 by 2020.
That is Santa Fe: three railroad-era farm towns that ran on artesian water and dairy cows for most of a century before deciding, in 1978, to become one city on the flat coastal ground they'd always shared.