La Porte

The developers chose the French word for door as the town's name, and by 1900 it had 537 people. That year Bishop Nicholas A. Gallagher founded St. Mary's Seminary there, which stayed until it moved to Houston in 1954. In the 1920s and 1930s Sylvan Beach Amusement Park drew national notice with dances and beauty contests featuring the bands of Rudy Vallee, Phil Harris and Benny Goodman. The 1953 La Porte-Baytown tunnel, the Johnson Space Center and the Bayport Channel fed later growth, and Lomax consolidated with La Porte in 1980. The city had 27,910 people in 1990.

What the plaque says

La Porte Colorado-based land developers A. M. York, J. H. York, I. R. Holmes, and Tom Lee formed the La Porte Land and Town Company in 1890. They purchased over 1,000 acres of land in this area and began laying out town lots in the fall of 1891. Edward York later joined his two brothers and the other investors to organize the La Porte Investment Company. Advertising to prospective settlers in New York State and the midwest, the developers began selling lots by January 1892. Soon a hotel, general mercantile store, and U. S. Post Office opened in the new town. The La Porte, Houston, and Northern Railroad, chartered in 1892, completed a line to Sylvan Beach Resort in 1899. Along with agriculture, the beach became the town's main economic mainstay. The original investment company became insolvent by 1895, but a new company purchased the land in 1898 and continued development efforts. Disastrous effects of the 1900 storm, as well as another storm and a fire in 1915, the discovery of the Goose Creek oil field in 1916, and the industrialization of the area following World War II, resulted in an increased population and a shift away from the agricultural character of the town. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 7.5 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.
• Space Center Houston — 8.3 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.
• Emancipation Park — 21 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 — 22 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 Mary's Seminary — 0.9 mi
• New Washington — 1.7 mi
• Gribble-Hofheinz House — 1.8 mi
• Bay Ridge / Morgan's Point — 2.1 mi