Seabrook, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a bayfront fishing town grew in bursts, took Hurricane Ike head-on, and rebuilt
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Seabrook sits on Galveston Bay at the mouth of Clear Lake, southeast of Houston near Pasadena and La Porte. Of the city's 21.3 square miles, only 5.3 are land — the rest is open water, and that fact alone shapes almost everything else about the place. This page is a plain guide to the town, written for anyone who wants to understand Seabrook before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Seabrook, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
Seabrook W. Sydnor, son of Galveston mayor John Seabrook Sydnor, bought the land in 1895. The Seabrook Company of Houston laid out the proposed townsite in March 1903, and the new settlement drew fishermen, merchants, and a handful of residents right from the start. Fishing was never incidental to Seabrook — it was the reason the town existed, and resident shrimpers and fishermen still bring in daily catches to the fish markets along Waterfront Drive.
A hard start and a slow rebuild
The young town's first real test came fast. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 demolished Seabrook's school, and it took until 1905 to rebuild it, with three teachers then serving 100 students. Growth after that was anything but steady — the population rose to 560 before the Great Depression, fell back to 200 by 1936, and sat near 400 for another decade before the Albert and Ernest Fay shipyard opened in 1947. That shipyard, with room for 150 boats, is what actually turned the population curve back upward.
The bridges that connected Seabrook to the bay
A fixed-span bridge linking Seabrook to Kemah opened in 1961, tall enough for sailboats to pass beneath, and its arrival lined up with something bigger: the opening of the Johnson Space Center nearby in Houston. Together they pushed Seabrook's population up toward 6,000. A second, taller bridge went up starting in 1986, after which Highway 146 finally ran unbroken from Galveston all the way to State Highway 225.
Hurricane Ike and a city almost surrounded by water
Seabrook was placed under mandatory evacuation on the morning of September 13, 2008, as Hurricane Ike closed in, and the storm delivered roughly 12 feet of surge into the city. Every part of Seabrook lost power, and many residents went without power and running water for up to a month. The city's own public library was damaged badly enough that it was rebuilt from the ground up, reopening larger in 2011. Seabrook describes itself today as a coastal community almost surrounded by water, and it still runs an active home-elevation program to get older, flood-prone houses above the base flood line.
A town built for the outdoors and the bay
Seabrook is a designated bird sanctuary with four stops on the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail, and its trail system runs 8 miles of crushed granite from Hammer Street down to Pine Gully Park on the bay. The city has held a sister-city relationship with Isla Santa Cruz, Ecuador, since June 19, 2002, and the historic downtown that grew up in the early 1900s still stands, filled mostly with antique shops and bed-and-breakfast places rather than chain storefronts.
That's Seabrook: a fishing town that grew in bursts rather than a steady line, took one of the hardest hits on Galveston Bay during Hurricane Ike, and rebuilt with most of its original waterfront character intact.