Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

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Austin Avenue and Fifth Street
flooded by a storm surge. A hurricane
hit Port Arthur in August 1915 and
flooded the town for almost three
weeks. The Federal Building, 320
Austin Avenue, can be seen on
extreme right. A child was born in the
building during the storm and was
named “Federal Building” by his
parents, Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Wright.
Construction of the building was
completed in 1912 at a cost of
$120,300. The offices of the
government’s postal, customs,
immigration, quarantine, agriculture,
public health, and recruiting services,
and the Port Arthur office of the
United States Weather Bureau were
housed in the building.
COURTESY OF THE PORT ARTHUR PUBLIC LIBRARY,
HISTORICAL COLLECTION.
Interstate Commerce Commission, Kansas City
Southern’s monopoly in south Jefferson County
ended, and its facilities opened to other carriers.
Arthur Stilwell, founder of Port Arthur and
other communities in the south Jefferson
County area, died in New York. Just how
completely John W. Gates has eclipsed Stilwell
in the area could be seen in its response to his
passing. Instead of sending a delegation to the
funeral, city officials sent their condolences and
a spray of flowers seven feet tall and three feet
wide. Perhaps too much time had passed, and
too many new residents had no knowledge or
memory of his early efforts.
Still, Stilwell had launched his namesake city
well, and its development continued through
the 1920s. With state cooperation, the Corps of
Engineers supervised the construction of a ninefoot
seawall around the city to protect it from
the occasionally angry waters of Lake Sabine,
and also a widening of the ship channel. The
seawall, plus a new bridge to Pleasure Island,
was completed in October 1931. The Vaughn
Hotel (later the Sabine), the Goodhue Hotel,
and Eddingston Court, the city’s first apartment
complex located on Procter Street, opened in
the summer of 1929. The most outstanding
feature of the Court was a wall decorated with
over six thousand conch shells from the
Cayman Islands. St. Mary Hospital, a successor
institution to Mary Gates Memorial Hospital,
opened on Ninth Avenue. The Port Arthur Rose
Garden Club established a municipal garden
and 154 raised beds along Lakeshore Drive and
encouraged the planting of thousands of rose
bushes throughout the area. A sadder reminder
of the past occurred in May 1930, when the
remains of Rudolph Lambert, a soldier and the
first casualty of World War I from Port Arthur,
came home for burial. The American Legion
Post there was named in Lambert’s honor. The
next year, Port Arthur’s list of “firsts” expanded
when Governor Ross Sterling signed legislation
allowing the location of a sub-courthouse in the
city because its population had reached
fifty thousand, almost as many as the county
seat, Beaumont.
In just over three decades, the villages of
south Jefferson County had grown dramatically.
Sabine Pass continued to serve as eastern Texas’
outlet to the sea and trade with the world;
Nederland and Port Neches shared Port Arthur’s
progress in petroleum and related industries,
and that city had become the seventh busiest
port in tonnage in the United States. The area
had endured and survived hurricanes, a world
war, and economic consequences and social
changes produced by such experiences. New
challenges just ahead in Depression and war,
and social changes would demand leadership
and grit, without a Stilwell or a Gates to guide
the way.
32 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL