Site of San Luis

San Luis had the first cotton compress in Texas. Robert Mills, a Brazoria merchant who helped found the town, built it here. George Hammeken's thousand-foot wharf let eight or ten ships from around the world anchor at once, and rain from the cotton sheds ran by gutter into a brick cistern about seventy feet across. A newspaper, the San Luis Advocate, was publishing by 1840. By 1842 tides and storms had filled the harbor, and a fierce hurricane in 1853 drove away the 400 or 500 who remained.

What the plaque says

Site of San Luis Located on an island owned by Stephen F. Austin in 1832, the town of San Luis was established by the early 1830s. In 1836 the Follett family opened a boardinghouse and established a ferry service between Galveston and Brazoria County. Developers such as George L. Hammeken laid off town lots and planned for a major rail and canal connection to local plantations for shipping cotton and other local products. By 1840 San Luis was a thriving community with a population of 2,000. There were plans to build a bridge to the mainland, and a plat filed with the county clerk in 1841 outlined a city with more than fifty blocks. Storms, harbor sanding and a depressed economy made San Luis a short-lived community. By the end of the 20th century, most of the original townsite was under water due to shoreline erosion. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 11 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.
• Galveston Island State Park — 13 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.
• Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm — 23 mi
  The concrete wall along the Gulf that Galveston built after the hurricane of September 8, 1900, which killed between 6,000 and 8,000 people in a city of 38,000.
• Moody Mansion — 25 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.

More markers nearby

• William Jarvis Cannan — 12 mi
• Sinking Site of the Blockade Runner "Acadia" — 13 mi
• Gulf Intracoastal Waterway — 13 mi
• Velasco — 13 mi