Properties 2017 Vol 4 ship channel

SHIP CHANNEL By: John Lomax

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1.2 million jobs throughout Texas $265 billion in economic impact $5 billion in state and local tax revenue Ranked first among American ports in foreign tonnage Third in total foreign cargo value Sixth ranked American container port

“Houston is truly the town that built a port that built a city.”

So said Fentress Bracewell, former chairman of the Port of Houston Authority Commission, and truer words have seldom been spoken. Just before the Houston Ship Channel officially opened in 1914, the Bayou City’s population stood at a shade under 80,000. With some 2.1 million inhabitants today, Houston has grown 26-fold since then, and while you can’t credit the channel for all of that growth, it is indisputably the single most important factor. Without the ship channel, we’d likely be Beaumont or Tyler. With it, we are a megapolis.

But there was a problem -- in the earliest days of the city, that whole “head of navigation” bit was another of Houston founders the Allen Brothers’ bald-faced stretchers. “Tide water runs to this place and the lowest depth of water is about six feet,” they promised in early newspaper ads touting their nonexistent city. “Vessels from New Orleans or New York can sail without obstacle to this place, and steamboats of the largest class can run down to Galveston Island in 8 or 10 hours, in all seasons of the year.”

Texas is America’s top exporting state and the Port of Houston is far and away it’s dominant entrepôt.

And to think, it all started with a muddy ditch and some Texas-sized dreams.

The Port of Houston once teemed at Allen’s Landing, where White Oak Bayou spills into Buffalo Bayou. That confluence of waterways made that site the head of navigation for hundreds of square miles of lush Brazos, San Jacinto and Trinity river farmlands. During Houston’s decade in the Republic of Texas and in the pre-Civil War era, Allen’s Landing was a thriving transshipment point. Wagonload after wagonload of cotton, rice and sugar, and other raw materials were trundled onto barges and steamboats that had just offloaded clothing, furniture, tools, and fine wines and rotgut whiskey for early Houston’s many saloons.

Well, not exactly. Yes, you could get some boats to Allen’s Landing but the trip was molasses slow and back-breakingly difficult, with fallen trees creating dangerous snags that required whole crews to remove. When the steamship Laura became the first such craft to chug up the bayou to Houston, so choked was the waterway with overhanging branches and fallen trees, the 12-mile trip upstream from Harrisburg took three

whole days, or an average speed of .16 mph.

Hauling those logs out of the bayou was the very first phase in the long process whereby a mere stream would be converted into one of the world’s mightiest ports.

That process got underway in 1840, perhaps the bleakest year in Houston’s history. The city had been ravaged by a yellow fever epidemic. Texas president Mirabeau Lamar had stolen the capital away to Austin, and no fewer than three ships had either sunk or become disabled in Buffalo Bayou downstream from Houston, blocking access to Galveston and the sea. The cities of Harrisburg and Galveston -- both blessed with far easier access to the Gulf -- were booming while Houston was down for the count, and for a time, there was a very real chance that Houston was fated to wither away, to become one more of the hundreds of boomtowns turned ghost that litter maps of early Texas.

And if not for the perseverance of city leaders of the time, that’s exactly what would have happened. Instead, early Houstonians banded together, formed a chamber of commerce, and went to work clearing the treacherous bayou of snags and shipwrecks.

Within a year, the fledgling town founded the Houston Port Authority.

Commerce was humming on the docks at the foot of Main Street once again, and by 1845, when Texas joined the Union, there was no more doomsday talk of withering away as a ghost town -- Houston was Texas’ third city, trailing only Galveston and San Antonio, and the gateway to the Lone Star State’s agricultural heartland.

Well, not quite. For the rest of the 19th Century, Houston remained a midpoint.

Much to the frustration of local merchants, goods shipped from Houston still had to be offloaded in Galveston from river vessels aboard ocean-worthy ships.

Islander middlemen took exorbitant cuts, enriching Galveston at Houston’s expense. Meanwhile, by 1890, wagon trains had given way to railways and while Houstonians kept pace -- city leaders would one day tout it as the city “Where 17 Railroads Met the Sea” -- Galvestonians did likewise, funneling all those trains down a single spur line to their port.

Houston was in danger of being bypassed by the railroad, a fate that had doomed many once promising cities.

Nature intervened with a ferocity never seen on these shores before or since. The 1900 Great Hurricane leveled Galveston and claimed the lives of 6000-8000 people. Suddenly the once-crazy idea that Houstonians, cognizant of the utter destruction of the oncepromising south Texas port city of Indianola, had long been pitching to politicians in Washington DC. Gulf coastal cities on barrier islands all lived on borrowed time, and any Texas port needed to be well inland -- yes, even 50 miles from the open ocean. America needed a port on the upper Texas coast, and the Great Storm had revealed Galveston as too risky a bet, so Houston it would be.

And the following year, as if to emphasize the point, the Spindletop oil field blew in just outside of Beaumont, with other gushers erupting all over Southeast Texas.

With the internal combustion engine roaring to life and with mass production

just around the corner, demand for black gold was soaring from coast to coast, and that fuel had limited means of transport.

A deep-sea port in the middle of that oilfield was even more a necessity than a shipment point for cotton, sugar, rice, and Midwestern corn and grain.

Now that the bayou was clear of logs and wrecks, the task was turned to widening and deepening the waterway. Though efforts to deepen the bayou to the 25 feet necessary for oceangoing vessels had been ongoing in fits and starts since the 1860s, the modern Houston Ship Channel

began to take shape in 1896. Just before resigning from his office in the US House of Representatives, Joseph C. Hutcheson quietly ushered a bill through Congress requesting an Army Corps of Engineers survey to determine the plausibility of deepening the bayou to the long-elusive 25 feet. Hutcheson arranged for a delegation to visit, by which time he had passed his seat to Thomas Ball of Huntsville, the man for whom the city of Tomball would one day be named.

For once, a flood proved beneficial to Houston: When the delegation from DC’s Rivers and Harbors Committee arrived in

Houston in 1897, heavy rains had swollen the bayou to a most impressive height and power, making the project seem easier than it would prove to be. They gave the project a thumbs-up, but that was useless without money. Congressman Ball set about rustling up funding, with little success at first, as Texas was then a Democratic state and DC was then under Republican control. Then along came that hurricane, and in the very same 1902 bill that funded the reconstruction of Galveston, President Teddy Roosevelt approved one million dollars for Houston’s port project.

At first, progress waxed and waned along with the supply of federal money.

By 1908, the bayou had been dredged to 18.5 feet, an impressive feat to be sure, but still far short of the goal. With an ingenuity born of frustration, Tom Ball and Houston mayor H. Baldwin Rice conjured up what was then an innovative financing plan: the county would form a local navigation district sell, bonds and oversee the channel, and sell bonds whose proceeds would match federal cash dollar-for-dollar. In 1910, the city’s $1.5 million bond issue set the wheels in motion on the Ship Channel’s final phase of construction.

And on November 10, 1914, it opened with a bang -- literally. At his desk in the Oval Office 1,400 miles away, President Woodrow Wilson pressed an ivory button that electronically detonated the charge in a cannon at the side of Houston’s brand new oceangoing harbor, and it was off to the races after that.

The Ship Channel boom came at no small cost to Houston. The lovely savannah-like terrain that once undulated down to the waterway and the alligatorridden, waterfowl-swarming jungle-like riverine forests along its banks were soon mercilessly consumed by the very first oil refineries that would blaze the trail for the Houston Ship Channel’s current status as the world’s second-largest petrochemical complex. The soft and sultry days of pleasure cruises to and from Galveston -- a little of Mark Twain’s steamboat mystique, complete with dining, dancing, and latenight poker -- became a thing of the past, those floating pleasure palaces replaced with chugging little tugs and enormous supertankers. And though it is no longer as toxic as it once was, the Houston Ship Channel remains far too polluted to enjoy recreationally the way our ancestors once did.

And yet even in its fearsome, flamebelching, fume-spewing monstrosity, there is a sort of awe-inspiring beauty to be found in the sheer applied science of it all: the might of the oceangoing tankers sliding almost silently past and the skill of the pilots who guide them safely in and out of the port, the chemistry in the plants, the industrial engineering in their construction, and the massive feats of civil engineering that made this 50 mile-long waterway possible to begin with. (Check it out yourself aboard the M/V Sam Houston, the Port’s free tour boat.)

Yes, the Allen Brothers engaged in more than a little puffery in their salesmanship of this new city, but when they predicted that it would one day become “the great interior commercial emporium of Texas,” they told no lie.