The Brazos Canal

The failed ditch had a successful rival, which the plaque mentions in a line. The Galveston and Brazos Navigation Company was chartered in February 1850 to join West Galveston Bay or San Luis harbor to the Brazos. Contractor David Bradbury finished it in early 1855: about four and a quarter miles long and fifty-five feet wide, running from San Luis Bay through Oyster Creek and East Union Bayou. Vessels carried Brazos cotton through it, but it could not match river and railroad traffic. The earlier canal had been dug by people the planters enslaved.

What the plaque says

The Brazos Canal Chartered in 1841, the Brazos Canal Company was the result of local landowners' efforts to build canals to connect inland plantations to Gulf shipping ports. Construction began in 1847 on a canal, referred to locally as the "slave ditch" because it was dug by the slaves of company owners. A one-mile section, twenty-four feet wide and three feet deep, took two years to complete. The project was soon abandoned. A rival company, the Galveston and Brazos Navigation Company, completed a canal between the Brazos River and Galveston Bay in 1856. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 7.6 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 — 14 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 — 15 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.
• Brazos Bend State Park — 25 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.

More markers nearby

• Mammoth Lake — 2.0 mi
• Dr. Branch Tanner Archer — 2.6 mi
• William Harris Wharton — 2.6 mi
• Joseph H. Hawkins — 2.8 mi