History & landmarks

Three towns, one oil field, a refinery, a tunnel, a bridge, and a neighborhood the bay took back. The whole thing in ten minutes.

Before oil

Nathaniel Lynch ran a ferry across the San Jacinto at Lynchburg in the 1820s, when this was Mexico. In April 1836 the Texas army marched past it to the battle that made Texas, eighteen minutes on the field across the river. For the next seventy years the land between the bayous was farms, a few landings on the bay, and the settlement at Cedar Bayou — quiet, wet, and mostly ignored.

Goose Creek, 1900s–1910s

Then oil. The Goose Creek field came in as a gusher field in the first years of the century, with some of the first over-water wells in Texas drilled on pilings in Tabbs Bay, and a boomtown called Goose Creek went up almost overnight — saloons, shotgun houses, a main street that would become Texas Avenue. Pelly, next door, was the company-town answer; Baytown, the third, grew up around the refinery site. Three towns, a mile apart, with three governments and one economy.

The refinery, 1919–1921

Humble Oil — founded in 1917, later Exxon — began building its refinery on the ship channel in 1919 and had it running by 1921, and the town's shape was set: the plant on the water, the workers on the land, the shift whistle running the day. Everything since, from the school district's budget to the Cuban Cafe's opening hour, traces back to it.

Consolidation, 1948

After decades of trying, Goose Creek, Pelly and Baytown voted to become one city in 1948 and took the youngest one's name. The rivalry survived in the high schools for a while. It's why the school district is still "Goose Creek" and the city is "Baytown."

The tunnel, 1953

Two lanes under the ship channel opened in 1953 — the Baytown Tunnel, one of the few road tunnels in Texas — and for forty years it was the way south, when it wasn't closed. The channel needed to be deeper than the tunnel, and by the eighties the bridge was inevitable.

Alicia, 1983

The hurricane pushed the bay into the Brownwood subdivision on the peninsula west of town. The land had been sinking for decades from groundwater pumping under the whole industrial corridor, and it didn't come back. The city bought out what was left and let the bay have it; the Nature Center opened on the ground a decade later. Subsidence districts across Harris County exist because of what happened here.

The bridge, 1995

The Fred Hartman Bridge — named for the Baytown Sun's publisher, who pushed for it — opened in 1995, the longest cable-stayed bridge in Texas, and the tunnel was cut apart and removed so the channel could go deeper. The skyline changed; so did the drive to Galveston.

The mall, the plants, the decline and return of downtown

The San Jacinto Mall opened on Garth in the eighties and drained Texas Avenue the way malls did everywhere; the plants expanded and expanded again; Mont Belvieu's salt domes became the country's NGL hub; the mall died and is being rebuilt; and in the 2010s the city bet on downtown — the ACE District, Art Alley, Town Square — and the bet is paying off one storefront at a time.

Now

About 85,000 people, a refinery skyline, a free ferry, a bird sanctuary where a neighborhood was, three good Saturdays in October, and a town that eats breakfast at four in the morning. The timeline page has every year with a source; this is the shape.

En español

Breve historia de Baytown: el ferry de Lynch en los 1820, la batalla de San Jacinto en 1836; el campo petrolero de Goose Creek a principios del siglo XX y tres pueblos — Goose Creek, Pelly, Baytown — que se unieron en 1948; la refinería de Humble Oil, construida entre 1919 y 1921; el túnel de 1953; el huracán Alicia de 1983 que se llevó el vecindario de Brownwood (hoy el Centro de Naturaleza); el puente Fred Hartman de 1995; el centro comercial que vació Texas Avenue y el Distrito ACE que la está trayendo de vuelta.