Galveston Office of the National Weather Service

The office on Rosenberg is the Weather Bureau's last Galveston address, not its first. Opened on the Strand in 1871, it moved around downtown for twenty years, took rooms in the Levy Building on Market in June 1898, and after the 1900 storm worked from the Trust Building until the mid-1940s. In 1946 it moved into the post office on Rosenberg, and by 1960 one of the first WSR-57 radars was installed. In September 1961 Dan Rather, then a twenty-nine-year-old Houston news director, broadcast Carla's radar image live from here. The service moved to Houston in 1994.

What the plaque says

Galveston Office of the National Weather Service First weather service office in Texas, and one of first in the United States; established April 19, 1871, slightly over a year after Congress passed an act in Feb. 1870 creating the Public Weather Service of the United States under the Army Signal Corps. For a century the Galveston service has issued Gulf storm forecasts. It correctly posted warnings prior to Texas' greatest natural disaster -- the 1900 hurricane that left more than 6,000 dead -- but had its own office demolished (although records were saved). Its men shared the common sorrows of the city in losses of family members and property. In Sept. 1961 the first live and direct televised picture of a hurricane -- the famous and devastating Carla -- was broadcast from the Galveston station. This set a pattern for other radar-equipped coastal weather stations throughout the United States. Galveston is the only weather station directly on the Gulf Coast west of Florida. Although many meteorological stations have moved with the coming of the aviation age, this oldest Texas station has compiled charts for 100 years within a 5-block area. Incise on base: Galveston County Historical Survey Committee (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Moody Mansion — 0.2 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 0.2 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.
• The Strand — 0.3 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 0.5 mi
  An iron barque launched in Aberdeen in 1877 that called at Galveston twice, ended up smuggling in the Adriatic, and was bought back from a Greek scrapyard to sail again from Pier 22.

More markers nearby

• Original Oleander Planting in Galveston — steps away
• The Rosenberg Library — 0.2 mi
• William Lewis Moody, Jr. — 0.2 mi
• Mardi Gras in Galveston — 0.2 mi