On August 30, 1836, the city of Houston was established when two entrepreneurial brothers from New York, Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen, ran an advertisement in the Telegraph and Texas Register for the "Town of Houston."
Ad announcing the availability of land sales in early Houston. Photo courtesy Houston Media Resource Center.
The town, which featured a mixture of timber and grassland, lay on the level Coastal Plain. The brothers claimed that the town would become “the great interior commercial emporium of Texas," that ships from New York and New Orleans could sail up Buffalo Bayou to its very door.
A rendering of what Houston imagined itself to be in 1846. Photo courtesy Houston Media Resource Center.
Although it took decades of political squabbling on both the local and national level, combined with the efforts, ingenuity and wrangling of laborers, engineers, bankers and industrialists alike, the boast was made truth. After years of dredging, in 1914 this dream was fully realized when state and federal authorities officially opened the Port of Houston and the Houston Ship Channel.
A dredge working on clearing the ship channel in preparation for the official opening of the Port. Photo courtesy Houston Media Resource Center.
Official opening ceremony for the Port of Houston. November 1914. Photo courtesy Houston Media Resource Center.
Today, the Port of Houston is the main port in the state of Texas and the world’s tenth largest port. The growth of the Port of Houston during its first century has been incomparable, and the Houston Ship Channel is a testimony to the hard work and perseverance of its founders and the diligence of its workforce. Now, one of the busiest waterways in the United States, the Houston Ship Channel has truly achieved its early promise to become the preeminent link between Texas and the sea.
Graphic: Ellen Peeples Cregan Design.