Harvey Houses of Silsbee

The Silsbee Bee's Hardin County sesquicentennial edition traces the hotel through its plans. A June 1905 report gave a revised plan for a hotel near the depot, and in March 1906 a newspaper described a house for railroad men with a bath, billiards and a reading room. It burned that year. The 1908 replacement stood 200 feet southeast, 24 by 80 feet, with a 24-foot-square dining room. An order of January 24, 1927, abandoned the facilities, and the two-story depot was bulldozed in the mid-1960s.

What the plaque says

Harvey Houses of Silsbee Laid out in 1894 as a sawmill town, Silsbee became a stop on the Santa Fe Railroad in 1902. By the end of that year a depot was built, and three years later a Harvey House Hotel opened. Named for entrepreneur Fred harvey, Harvey House Hotels and restaurants were located along the Santa Fe lines from Chicago to California. Offering efficient and elegant service, Harvey Houses often were an important part of a town's cultural life. The Silsbee Harvey Hotel burned in 1906, but a new Harvey House Restaurant, completed in 1908, continued in operation until 1923. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Village Creek State Park — 7.0 mi
  A 2,466-acre state park on one of the few free-flowing creeks in Texas, with a launch for the Village Creek Paddling Trail, boat rentals and sandy-upland trails in the Big Thicket.
• Big Thicket National Preserve — 15 mi
  Start at the Kountze visitor center, where rangers sort the preserve's scattered units for you, and learn why Congress made this 1974 string of pearls the country's first national preserve.
• McFaddin-Ward House — 19 mi
  A Beaux-Arts Colonial Revival mansion finished in 1906 and lived in by one family for 75 years, with free guided tours of three furnished floors, the carriage house and gardens.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 23 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• Site of Former Settlement of Richardson's Bluff — 5.9 mi
• Wiess Bluff — 8.1 mi
• General Braxton Bragg, C. S. A. — 8.3 mi
• Courthouses of Hardin County — 8.4 mi