Wooster Community

Brownwood, the subdivision the plaque says now lies underwater, shows how Wooster's ground was lost. Its houses stood on a peninsula among Scott, Crystal and Burnet bays, and decades of industrial groundwater pumping lowered the land by roughly nine to ten feet. Hurricane Carla's tides in 1961 reached homes that had never flooded. Hurricane Alicia, on August 18, 1983, brought a 10.7-foot tide and finished the neighborhood; residents were barred from rebuilding, and the city and FEMA bought out the remaining owners. The cleared peninsula became the Baytown Nature Center, a recreated wetland of about 500 acres.

What the plaque says

Wooster Community Wooster was founded by Quincy Adams Wooster and Willard D. Crow, who came here from Mapleton, Iowa, with their families late in 1892 and purchased more than 1,000 acres in the Nathaniel Lynch league. Junius Brown, also from Monona County, Iowa, bought adjacent land a few weeks later, and moved his family here in 1893. Until the Humble Refinery opened in 1919, most residents of the area were related to these three families. Wooster and Crow originally platted the town of Wooster on their land in January 1893, but the community actually developed in the early 1920s on Brown's land in the James Strange labor. Wooster existed for a long time as a pleasant rural community. Its business district, located on Market Street Road (now Bayway Drive) near Wooster Street, included grocery stores, cafes, a service station, churches, schools, a volunteer fire department, and a chamber of commerce. Much of the town's economy was connected to the oil refinery. The Wooster-Crow land was first developed with the opening of two new residential subdivisions of Wooster: Wooster Heights in 1930 and Brownwood in 1937. During WWII, the area hosted a temporary holding camp for German POWs. Baytown's repeated attempts to annex Wooster succeeded in 1962. Today the Wooster community is nearly gone, having succumbed to the forces of both nature and progress. Much of Brownwood is submerged due to extensive subsidence and the devastation of hurricanes Carla and Alicia; all remaining homes have been removed and the area is now the Baytown Nature Center. Between 1999 and 2007, ExxonMobil purchased almost all of the homes in Wooster and Wooster Terrace to create a greenbelt around the refinery; however, the Wooster Heights and Lakewood subdivisions remain intact. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 2.9 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 — 14 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 — 20 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.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 20 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.

More markers nearby

• The Lynchburg Volunteers — 0.7 mi
• Homesite (Point Pleasant) of William Scott — 0.7 mi
• Hannah Este Burnet — 1.6 mi
• Humble Oil & Refining Company — 2.2 mi