Create an Account - Increase your productivity, customize your experience, and engage in information you care about. The City of Galveston was chartered in The role of Galveston as the principal port and gateway to the Southwest during the 19th Century has placed the entire city in a unique position in relation to the history of Texas.
The city furnished shipping, goods, money, and transportation necessary to settle the state, nurture its trade, and help accomplish its independence. In , Michael Menard bought "one league and a labor of land" from the Republic of Texas. He helped organize the Galveston City Company in From to , the city was a major immigration port for over a quarter million Europeans.
Texas' secession from the Union and the Civil War halted development temporarily. The mid s to the mid s was the apex of Galveston's prosperity. The Strand area became the Wall Street of the Southwest. The area was discovered by the Spanish explorer, Juan de Grijalva in , and the island became the base of operations for the French-American pirate and privateer, Jean Lafitte, in the early 19th century.
In , the Congress of Mexico designated Galveston a provisional port and customs entry point — an act which was repeated by the Congress of the United States in , even though the government of Mexico refused to recognize Texas as an independent territory. In , six years after the Mexican War ended in a decisive American victory, the State of Texas joined various dock and warehousing interests together to form the Galveston Wharf and Cotton Press Company.
By , Galveston was the leading U. In September of that same year, the Great Galveston Hurricane, with winds of miles per hour, made landfall, resulting in the deaths of thousands of people and the devastation of the City of Galveston and most of Galveston Island.
It was the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States. In , by a vote of the citizens of Galveston, the private interests controlling the Galveston Wharf Company sold their holdings to the city of Galveston and the Port became known as the Galveston Wharves. Its facilities cover acres, with acres on the southern, City of Galveston side of the channel and another acres on Pelican Island, of which are undeveloped.
The Port has 39 piers and businesses that operate out of it. In addition, the Port hosts a robust ship and rig repair business including a shipyard to service the offshore oil industry. There is a Board of Trustees of the Galveston Wharves, comprised of seven individuals, six of whom are appointed by the City Council. One member is an ex- officio member of the Board who is either a member of the City Council or the Mayor.
The oversight and management of the Port is left to the Board of Trustees. I need to generate enough revenues to pay for my expenses and do capital improvements to my facilities.
Being close to the Gulf of Mexico is also a reason that three major cruise lines have chosen the Port of Galveston as their home base as opposed to docking in Houston, some 50 miles away , making Galveston the 4th busiest cruise port in the U. So they have a nine to ten hour turnaround. Most of our passengers drive to Galveston to go on a cruise, so we charge people to park their cars for either the full four, five, or seven days of the cruise they go on.
That is approximately 18 percent of our revenues. During the last of these, Sealy died en route. His nephew John Hutchings Sealy was named to succeed him in In , while Galveston was busy with its project to elevate the level of the east end of the island and build a seventeen-foot-high protective seawall, nearby Texas City opened its own deepwater wharves.
Nevertheless-and even after Houston opened its deepwater channel in Galveston continued to prosper. In , the Cotton Concentration Company was formed on wharf company property as an independent company to alleviate complaints from customers about the vagaries in classifying and handling cotton.
George Sealy II was its first president. Kempner 7, , Adoue and Lobit 7, , W. Moody 7, , Robert Waverly Smith 7, , and C. Moore 5, This company became the largest feeder of cotton to the wharves and brought much-needed uniformity in handling this important commodity. It did most of the cotton compressing and exporting until the compress industry moved inland. In the wharves came under the jurisdiction of the Railroad Commission as a common carrier.
In Galveston was the number-two port in the nation in total value of imports and exports; that year it exported 4,, bales of cotton. In the city threatened to build its own wharves across the harbor on Pelican Island and to dismember the wharf company. Nothing came of the idea, however, but more hard feelings between the wharf company and its detractors. The port prospered during World War I with the shipments of troops and war supplies to France, but the business slump after the war hurt the cotton business and caused unemployment in Galveston.
A longshoremen's strike that began in New York City carried over to the wharves in Dockworkers demanded a twenty-five-cent hourly pay increase and the right to bargain collectively through the International Longshoremen's Association. At the request of the Galveston Chamber of Commerce, Gov. Hobby sent six Texas Rangers to provide some law and order. On January 19, , the strike was settled when the longshoremen, faced with the prospect of replacement by other capable dockworkers, were forced to settle for a seven-cent raise.
During the s Houston, Texas City, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange, Freeport, Corpus Christi, and Brownsville were all benefiting greatly from the burgeoning oil and gas industry after the huge Spindletop oilfield was opened. Large cotton companies were also moving to Houston to get closer to better rail connections and farther away from the threat of hurricanes.
In George Sealy II became president of the wharves. He was intimately familiar with the wharf company and had been active in its management as vice president for many years. The death of its largest stockholder, J. Sealy, in caused several changes that affected the wharves in subtle ways.
The wharves had always depended on the private partnership bank of Hutchings, Sealy and Company to provide essential cotton financing. The bank was rechartered as a national institution in However, as such it became restricted in the amount of lending it could concentrate on any one commodity, including cotton.
To resolve the problem, in the partners formed the Galveston Corporation, a holding company for the stock of the wharf company, the cotton compress company, and other related companies. With the stock market soaring in , several offers to buy were made to the wharves' owners. One such offer came from a New York group who eventually revealed that they were representing a partnership, one of whose principals was Shearn Moody of Galveston.
The Moody family had become increasingly vocal in its criticism of the wharves' management and at every local election used sentiment against the wharf company as a political issue. With help from the Moody-owned Galveston News , Moody's family lawyer, Frank Anderson, attacked the wharf company in a bitter city campaign, agitating for the "municipal" ownership of the wharves. This private offer was refused and only served to increase the acrimony between the two powerful families.
The stock market crash in the fall of ended interest from stock promoters. At the beginning of the Great Depression immediate problems faced the wharves from cut-rate competition from the port of Houston and her cotton merchants. Several Houston firms had cut their compression rates by thirty cents a bale, and several old-line Galveston customers were switching to Houston.
This, in addition to freight rates that already favored Houston, prompted Sealy to action. With the help of E. This company bought and leased a fleet of more than trucks and trailers that brought cotton and wool from as far away as El Paso and shipped sugar to Oklahoma. In December , Sealy initiated a meeting with the most influential cotton men in Houston to seek a resolution to the long-standing "Galveston rate differential" problem, which unfairly added cost to cotton shipments by rail to Galveston.
Many unsuccessful and expensive lawsuits had been brought, yet the Railroad Commission refused to rule for fear of alienating the politically powerful Houston.
At a meeting with William L. He stated that they were entitled to whatever rate benefits were fair to equalize the effect of their fifty-mile ship channel, but no more. At the meeting the participants compromised on an equalization of railroad rates for miles around Houston. The agreement was quickly ratified by the Railroad Commission in January That, along with pressure from the trucking company, finally forced the railroads to go along and set more equal rates by The s brought prolonged hard times for the wharves because of a long and severe drought in the main cotton and grain farming areas of the Southwest.
Economic conditions were further depressed by the lingering world depression and Roosevelt's "New Deal" policies, which expressly discouraged the growing of cotton in favor of other crops.
Cotton exports fell dramatically from seven million bales annually in the United States to , bales by In the largest grain elevator on the coast in the nation, Elevator B, with six million bushels of storage capacity, was opened on the wharves.
Jones , federal funds were being loaned at low rates to other port cities to stimulate the capital improvements in their wharves.
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