Old Quintana

Quintana had to build its own harbor mouth. From 1879 to 1881 the Kanter family contracted to build jetties at the Brazos, weaving cut brush into weighted mattresses as a base for concrete blocks of beach sand and Portland cement, and did not finish. In 1889 the Farwell Syndicate built them of Texas granite. Before the Civil War the town had the only shipyard west of New Orleans. A brick road uncovered by the 1913 flood was buried by silt two years later. The Handbook blames the town's decline on storms and progress.

What the plaque says

Old Quintana Named for a Mexican general. Early as 1532 a thriving village. Port of entry in Republic of Texas. Strategic port in Civil War. Industrial area, cattle and cotton shipping point, 1870-1900. Fashionable summer colony, 1884 and afterwards. Largely destroyed in 1900 storm. Now a resort and fishing center. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 8.6 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 21 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Galveston Island State Park — 28 mi
  A cattle ranch willed to the state that now runs the full width of Galveston Island, from two miles of Gulf beach across dunes and prairie to the marshes of West Galveston Bay.

More markers nearby

• The Lively — 0.8 mi
• Old Velasco, C. S. A. — 1.8 mi
• Velasco — 1.8 mi
• Gulf Intracoastal Waterway — 1.8 mi