Aldine

Aldine's figs belonged to a Gulf Coast boom that outlasted the town's cannery. The Magnolia variety favored for canning was first called Brunswick and took its new name around 1900; one story holds that traveling salesmen substituted figs for magnolia trees. Texas had about a million fig trees in 1910 and ten times that by 1930, most between Houston and Galveston, despite a 1912 freeze. In the mid-1960s some 2,800 coast farms still produced over a million pounds. Aldine, named for a local farm family, grew again from the late 1970s and counted 13,979 people in 2000.

What the plaque says

Aldine The railroad arrived in this area, first called Prairie Switch, in 1873. The Aldine Post Office was established in 1896; twenty-five to thirty families, most of Swedish descent, settled on Aldine's fertile land. Here they grew such products as Satsuma oranges, pears and magnolia figs. In 1900 developer E. C. Robertson and his partner, F. W. Colby of Kansas, began to market parcels of land to out-of-state speculators, many of whom bought tracts sight unseen. A Presbyterian Church was organized from a Union Sabbath School in 1902, and the town began to grow. It soon boasted a hotel and general store, a two-room schoolhouse erected on this site in 1910, and a cemetery deeded for community use in 1911. Aldine resident J. C. Carpenter operated a small fig cannery until 1914 or 1915 when the Carpenter Fig Company opened a cannery nearby. Reportedly one of the largest fig preserving plants in the U. S., it employed twenty-five to thirty people during the canning season. The fig industry died out from 1918 to 1920 because of freezes, blight and lack of sugar during World War I. Dairy farms replaced fruit farms and the Magnolia Oil Company established a large crude oil pumping station in Aldine in 1923. The Aldine Railroad Depot shut down in 1931 or 1932, and the post office closed in January 1935. The community turned to automobiles for transportation. Farmers began marketing their wares in Houston. The town of Aldine gradually declined. In 1932 four area common school districts joined to form the Aldine Independent School District. Now a part of the metropolis of Houston, the townsite of Aldine remains only in the annals of Texas history. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 12 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 14 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 14 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 14 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Saint Paul A. M. E. Church — 4.4 mi
• Greater Ward A.M.E. Church — 5.7 mi
• Acres Homes Community — 5.8 mi
• Sam Houston High School — 5.9 mi