Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

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Nederland High School, located on
South 12th Street and Avenue B, 1913.
COURTESY OF THE PORT ARTHUR PUBLIC LIBRARY,
HISTORICAL COLLECTION.
The Texas Company purchased Central
Asphalt & Refining Company in Port Neches,
then still known as Grigsby’s Bluff. To replace
Hotel Sabine, which burned in 1903, as Port
Arthur’s central meeting facility and primary
quality host, Gates built The Plaza Hotel. He
purchased Stilwell’s experimental farm and
renamed it Port Arthur Nurseries, and from it,
donated 1,000 eucalyptus trees to decorate the
city’s boulevards. Gates Model Farm, located on
North Procter Street, produced and marketed
milk and milk products, eggs, figs, oranges,
grapefruit—and all those eucalyptus trees. Gates
was a major player in the founding of Mary Gates
Memorial Hospital, named in honor of Gates’
mother, and of Port Arthur Business College.
By 1908 Port Arthur claimed over 8,000
residents and old and new communities in the
southern part of Jefferson County prospered as
well. Sabine Pass lost most of its shipping
prominence to Port Arthur, but Sun Oil
Company constructed loading docks in that
coastal area after the discovery of oil at
Spindletop; the docks remained in service until
1927. Port Arthur annexed the area in 1978, but
Sabine Pass continued as a distinct community,
and as late as 1984, when the Texas Almanac
reported population figures separately from Port
Arthur, approximately 1,500 lived there.
Sun Oil, The Texas Company, and Pure (later
Union) Oil Company played major roles in the
development of Nederland by establishing major
terminals or refineries there. Nederland enjoyed
rail transportation to Port Arthur and Beaumont
via an interurban service. The Mid-County
Chronicle began publishing in Nederland in 1930.
The population of Nederland gradually increased
to more than 16,000 by 2000 through natural
growth and development and the city’s function
as a bedroom community for Port Arthur
and Beaumont.
The Griffing brothers laid out the community
of Groves, originally called Peach Groves and
later The Groves, on a tract they acquired from
Gates. Like a great deal of southern Jefferson
County, Groves became an industrial-residential
city, especially after the Atlantic Oil Company
established a refinery near there on a site later
occupied by BASF, and by the end of the century
claimed over 16,000 residents.
John Warne Gates died on August 9, 1911,
while in Paris. When the news reached Port
Arthur, flags were struck to half-mast and local
industries he owned and/or controlled shut
down for the day. City and Chamber officials
recruited a delegation to attend the funeral in
New York City, businesses in Port Arthur closed
in memoriam on that date, and 2,000 people
gathered in a memorial service on the lawn of
the Plaza Hotel, a facility opened in 1909 by
Gates. A year later the community observed its
first annual Gates Day, a commemorative
celebration of Gates’ short but significant
association with Port Arthur and southern
Jefferson County; Gates Day observance ceased
in 1920 because of the request from the Gates
28 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL