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Although Houston, the fourth largest city in the USA, is an inland city lying fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico, it is the nation's second largest port. How, you may ask, can an inland city be a major port? Well, the story goes back 105 years. Back in the year 1900, Gulf of Mexico port of Galveston was the largest city in Texas. Houston was just an unimportant, nondescript small city fifty miles north of the Gulf. But things were about to change. On the second weekend of September of 1900 a hurricane that historians now believe was a category 5 hit Galveston Island. The devastation was complete. Over 5,000 lives were lost, a number that until this day has not been surpassed by a natural disaster in the USA. After the crushing blow dealt Galveston by the hurricane, the city fathers began an engineering fete that still seems incredible. They raised the level of the island by 17 feet creating a sea wall along the shore and filling in the land behind that sturdy structure at an angle so that the downtown area would remain as it was before. The buildlings that remained after the hurricane were raised. New streets were created, and the city was optimistic that once the grade raising was completed it would again be the main port on the Gulf, but Houston saw it's opportunity and acted quickly. Buffalo Bayou is a creek that runs from Houston to the Gulf of Mexico. Steamboats had been able to navigate it, but sailing ships were too deep to maneuver its shallow depths. In a quick and clever move, the bayou was dredged to make it deep enough to accommodate ocean going ships which were then able to dock inside the city. Galveston, meanwhile, was so occupied raising the level of the city that it never knew what hit it until the ship channel was finished, and Houston took over as the main port in the western part of the Gulf of Mexico.
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Waiting to Board the Boat
On the Cruise