Galveston Seawall and the 1900 Storm

Saturday, September 8, 1900, began like a workday in Galveston, a city of 38,000. The morning paper carried one paragraph about a storm in the Gulf, and the local Weather Bureau chief, Isaac M. Cline, drove a horse cart through the low streets urging people to leave. Few did before the bridges to the mainland went down. Through the afternoon the wind rose, the anemometer blew away at 5:15, and about 6:30 a storm wave raised the water four feet at once. Soon the whole city lay under as much as fifteen feet of water. Wreckage from each row of houses battered the next. By morning between 6,000 and 8,000 people in the city were dead, and perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 on the island, and 2,636 houses were gone.

Galveston rebuilt itself higher. Besides the seawall, sand pumped from the Gulf floor raised the city's grade as much as seventeen feet, which meant first jacking up 2,146 buildings, streetcar tracks, fireplugs and water pipes. The heaviest was a 3,000-ton church, raised five feet while services went on. The storm also gave the country the commission form of city government.

The wall has been lengthened several times since, and a walk along its top is the easiest way to read the city's answer to the storm. The 1900 Storm memorial stands on the wall here.