Texas City

Texas City is a town built by its terminal company. After Hugh B. Moore became president of the Texas City Railway Terminal Company in 1921, it brought in a sugar refinery, tank farms, a gasoline-cracking plant and a fig-preserving works; the sugar refinery failed by 1930. Republic Refinery opened in 1931 and Pan-America in 1934, which Moore won away from the Houston Ship Channel. In 1940 the Defense Plant Corporation chose land donated by the company for the only tin smelter in the western hemisphere, and Monsanto built a pilot plant for styrene used in synthetic rubber.

What the plaque says

Texas City This community traces its origin to settlement by a few families along the bayshore in the mid-1800s. Completion in 1854 of the Half Moon Shoal Lighthouse, a Federal project near the present day Texas City Dike, hastened the formation of a village which in 1878 added a post office under the name Shoal Point. In 1891-1892 Minnesota investors chose Shoal Point as the future site of a port and industrial center and asked their friend Frank Davison to manage the venture. By the end of 1893 the town, renamed Texas City, had a hotel, railroad station, post office, and a 6-mile-long channel project underway. Despite delays created by the 1900 storm, an enlarged channel capable of receiving ocean going vessels was completed by 1905. Construction of a tank farm in 1920 initiated decades of oil refining and petrochemical industrial development. The city's rapid growth in the late 1930s and during World War Ii was briefly interrupted by the disastrous port explosions of 1947. Nevertheless, during the 1950s the city's population almost doubled to 32,000 people as the local economy responded to a surge in worldwide demand for oil by-products. By 1992 Texas City was Galveston County's largest mainland city. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa — 9.6 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 — 9.7 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.
• Moody Mansion — 9.9 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.
• 1859 Ashton Villa — 10.0 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.

More markers nearby

• First Methodist Church of Texas City — 1.3 mi
• Texas City Memorial Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• Texas City Dike — 1.6 mi
• First Aero Squadron — 1.6 mi