EDITOR’S CORNER
Whenever hurricane season swirls around I think of Houston.
And whenever I think of Houston, the first thing I think of is “why did they put the nation’s fourth largest city in a swamp where water cannot drain?”
Actually, that’s not true. The first thing I think of is the late, and very great, Bum Phillips, the bravest man in the history of this planet.
Bum once told an interviewer his wife accompanied him on all the Houston Oilers’ road trips “because she’s too ugly to kiss goodbye.”
And survived.
But the second thing I think about, whenever there’s something ominous rotating in the Gulf, is why a city so large sits in a place where you could put saddles on the mosquitoes and fly them around like that planet in Star Wars.
And the answer is a combination of luck and a forward-looking master stroke of planning.
At the end of the Texas Revolution in 1836, brothers, and entrepreneurs, John and Gus Allen were looking to make some money and do it outside of crowded Galveston.
So they scouted out land up Galveston Bay.
They rejected two places and finally purchased their third choice, a tract on a sluggish, and not terribly picturesque, stream called Buffalo Bayou.
They built a cabin, decided they had founded a city and named it after their—and just about everyone else’shero, General Sam Houston.
Then they set about promoting their “city,” which at that point consisted of 12 residents and a cabin.
The Allens touted their new metropolis as “handsome and beautifully elevated, salubrious and well watered.”
A visitor at the time, however, termed fledgling Houston as “one of the most disagreeable places on earth.”
But the Allens’ cheerleading worked. Houston grew to about 1,500 in its first year, but one of the swamp’s periodic yellow fever epidemics then killed 12 percent of the town’s population.
One of them was John Allen.
There were quickly so many sunken ships in the area the new Houston Chamber of Commerce was using taxpayer money to clear them.
Houston continued to be just another small Texas city until around the turn of the 20th Century when three events, coming almost together, shaped its destiny.
Several Houston businessmen got Congress to make Houston a deep water port. By the way, that story was told by Drayton McLane a few years ago at dedication of the new Milano VFD Fire Station.
Then, in 1900, a devastating hurricane struck Galveston, still the worst natural disaster in American history.
Investors became frightened of investing in a place which was, after all, on an island, and cast an eye toward the new, and sheltered, deep water port at the north end of Galveston Bay.
The next year oil was discovered at Spindletop near Beaumont.
Oil-rich southeast Texas boomed and Houston was its focal point.
Throw in the port and soon the Allen Brothers’ little town was “the place where 17 railroads meet the sea.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
And that’s why, on some days, you can be driving down the Gulf Freeway and it looks like the Gulf is in the freeway.
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