Kemah

Kemah was Evergreen first, and for a while it was also Shell Siding, because the railroad hauled shell from the area. The Handbook of Texas says it became Kemah in 1907, when the post office opened and another community already used the old name. The same entry calls Kemah an Indian word meaning facing the winds, for the town's place on the bay, and names no nation. By 1914 Galveston and Houston families kept summer homes here, and fishing camps lined the shore. A Blessing of the Fleet each August recalls the shrimping town.

What the plaque says

Kemah Michael Gouldrich, one of Stephen F. Austin's original three hundred colonists, received a Mexican land grant here in 1824. Elizabeth S. Justice acquired a part of the property in 1853. By the early 1890s Abraham and Elizabeth (Justice) Kipp, their daughter Jane, and her husband, James Bradford, had acquired the balance of the original Gouldrich Mexican land grant. In 1898 the Texas & New Orleans Railroad extended a track through the area which prompted the Kipp and Bradford families to establish a townsite here named Evergreen. Despite its destruction by a storm in 1900, the village was rebuilt after the Kipps and Bradfords erected large family homes here in 1901. The name of the town was changed to Kemah with the granting of a post office in 1907. Gulf-related businesses such as boat building, commercial fishing, and tourism helped Kemah grow into a town of 1,300 people by 1922. Kemah was connected with Seabrook by bridge in 1929. A large shrimp fleet located here after the Clear Creek Channel opened in the 1950s. Kemah sustained major storm damage in 1961 but recovered and was formally incorporated in 1965. Marine storage facilities built in this area in the 1970s and 1980s continued to boost the local economy. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Space Center Houston — 5.1 mi
  The visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 15 mi
  The 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 21 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.
• The Strand — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Ritson Morris and Elmwood Plantation — 2.5 mi
• Webster Presbyterian Church — 4.0 mi
• San Leon — 4.0 mi
• Prehistoric Indian Campsite — 4.2 mi