City of Humble

The Handbook adds the railroad and the mill. In 1876 Humble was a flag station on a line nicknamed the Rabbit, because passengers shot rabbits when the train stopped on its way from Houston to Shreveport. The 1880 count found ten White and fifty Black residents, and the Black residents ran the lumbermill. Mill owner Charles Bender bought the townsite and set up a commissary where workers traded tokens for goods. Voters turned down incorporation in 1929, but the town took a city charter on August 28, 1933, and by 1970 the Eastex Freeway linked it to Houston.

What the plaque says

City of Humble A pioneer oil boom town. Originated as crossroads community named for settler Pleasant Smith Humble (1835?-1912), who lived here before 1889, hewing his timber into railroad ties, mining gravel from his land, keeping store, and serving as justice of the peace. Neighbors included the Bender, Durdin, Isaacks, Lee, Slaughter, and Williams families. Economic bases were farms and sawmills. The post office opened 1902. In 1904 C. E. Barrett (1866-1926) drilled for oil in this area, securing small production on Moonshine Hill. On Jan. 7, 1905, he brought in the No. 2 Beaty Well which yielded 8,500 barrels a day, opening the great boom. From a village of 700, Humble grew at once into a town of 20,000. Field production-- the largest in Texas for the year 1905-- was 15,594,923 barrels of oil. The field was named for the town. A group of its operators, including Ross S. Sterling, later (1931-33) governor of Texas, in 1911 incorporated a new oil company named for the field, thus spreading into the annals of world commerce the town's name. Production from several strata here exceeded the total for fabulous Spindletop by 1946. Known as the greatest salt dome field, Humble still produces and the town for which it was named continued to thrive. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 18 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.
• Emancipation Park — 19 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 19 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Humble Lodge No. 979, A.F. & A.M. — steps away
• First United Methodist Church of Humble — 0.5 mi
• Moonshine Hill — 2.0 mi
• Saint Paul A. M. E. Church — 11 mi