Texas City, Texas - A Local Area Guide
How a duck hunter's tip became a deepwater port, and what the city has survived since
More about this in Texas City
Texas City sits on the southwest shoreline of Galveston Bay, about 37 miles southeast of downtown Houston and 10 miles northwest of Galveston. The city exists because three brothers from Duluth, Minnesota went duck hunting in 1891 and noticed a stretch of shoreline called Shoal Point that looked like it could become a major port. This page is a plain guide to the city that grew from that trip, written for anyone who wants the background before reading anything else on this site. For the full record, the Texas City, Texas page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.
Where the town came from
Benjamin, Henry and Jacob Myers formed a syndicate after that 1891 hunting trip and convinced other investors to buy 10,000 acres of Galveston Bay frontage, renaming the area Texas City. By 1893 the Texas City Improvement Company had platted the townsite and gotten federal permission to dredge a shipping channel from Bolivar Roads. The port opened for commercial traffic in 1894, and the city incorporated in 1911 under a mayor-and-commission government, with William P. Tarpey winning its first mayoral election that September.
A port that became a refining center
A refinery built next to the port in 1908 was, for years, the only one in Texas capable of producing wax and lubricating oil byproducts. More refineries followed through the 1920s and 1930s, and World War II turned the city's industrial base into a critical piece of the war effort, supplying petroleum products after enemy submarines cut off shipments from overseas and building a tin smelter and a synthetic-rubber plant to meet wartime demand.
The 1947 disaster
That wartime industrial growth set the stage for the worst day in the city's history. On April 16, 1947, the French ship Grandcamp, loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer, exploded in the Texas City port. The blast and the chain of secondary explosions it triggered killed 581 people and injured more than 5,000, destroying entire blocks of homes and wiping out the city's fire department entirely. It's still regarded as the worst industrial accident in U.S. history, and it became the foundation for modern American disaster planning. The city rebuilt and has long called itself "the town that would not die," a name tested again by a 1987 hydrogen fluoride gas release at the Marathon Oil refinery and by a 2005 BP refinery explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 180.
The levee that protects the city today
Hurricane Carla's flooding in 1961 led Texas City to build a 17-mile levee system, paired with pump stations, that rings most of the city. That system is credited with largely sparing Texas City from the storm-surge devastation Hurricane Ike caused elsewhere in Galveston County in 2008, even though the surge overtopped the Texas City Dike outside the levee line and destroyed its buildings and road for a three-year rebuild. The Dike itself, built in the 1930s from tumbled granite to protect the Houston Ship Channel from silting, still extends about 5.2 miles into Galveston Bay and is known locally as the world's longest man-made fishing pier. You can find current information through the City of Texas City government website.
The city today
Texas City had grown to 51,898 residents by the 2020 census, making it the third-largest city in Galveston County behind League City and Galveston. The Port of Texas City still ranks as the eighth-largest in the United States and third-largest in Texas by tonnage, and the surrounding Texas City Industrial Complex remains one of the country's major petrochemical refining centers.
That is Texas City: a port built on a duck hunter's hunch, rebuilt more than once after some of the worst industrial disasters in American history, and protected today by a levee system that has kept the worst of the bay at bay. </content>