Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

❖
CITY OF
PORT ARTHUR
Right: This aerial view of downtown
Port Arthur taken in the late 1930s,
shows the rear side of the Municipal
Building, bottom center, the city water
tower (at left), the Goodhue Hotel
(center left), the Sabine Hotel (center
right), and the Jefferson County Subcourthouse
(far right).
Bottom, left: The Mary Gates Hospital
at 325 Lakeshore Drive was donated
in his mother’s name by John W. “Beta-million”
Gates, one of the more
influential early Port Arthurians. Built
in 1909 and demolished in 1971, the
structure served as the Port Arthur
Municipal Building from 1930 to
1970, when the new City Hall opened
in the 400 block of Fourth Street.
Bottom, right: The Newport Bar on
Austin Avenue between Fourth and
Procter Streets, was one of the many
“Gentleman’s Resorts” during Port
Arthur’s wide-open days of anything
goes as long as those in power
received their share of the
“shakedown.” In January 1961,
thirty-one-year-old State
Reresentative Tom James, of Dallas,
shook up Port Arthur and Beaumont
when he brought his Commission to
town to investigate the open
gambling, prostitution and illegal
liquor sales that had made the two
port cities so popular for visiting
merchant mariners.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE PORT ARTHUR
PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Railroads and safe harbors were
the real life stuff that the dreams
of Port Arthur were made on. Port
Arthur’s birth found purpose in the
rapid commercial and transportation
expansion at the end of the nineteenth
century, while its continued growth was
fed by the booming oil business of the
twentieth century.
Arthur Edward Stilwell already was a
legendary pioneer in the fields of
insurance, transportation and finance
when he came to Jefferson County in 1895. A
believer in powers of the psyche, Stilwell’s own
writings tell how “brownies” came to him in a
dream and advised him against purchasing the
Houston East and West Railroad. Instead, the
pixies told him to build his railroad “directly
south from Shreveport.”
“Locate your terminal,” the spirits told the
thirty-six-year-old man, “on the north shore of
Sabine Lake,” according to information this
writer gathered and wrote for the Port Arthur
News “City Centennial Extra Edition” published
on May 28, 1998. “… And there occurred to me
a picture of a city…on the north bank of Lake
Sabine…here in this landlocked harbor, safe
from the most devastating storms, we would
create a port,” Stilwell wrote.
And so began the history of Port Arthur,
named for the man many say was a visionary who
“boomed dozens” of towns along the railroad line
from Kansas City to the Gulf Coast, said Michael
Cate of Looking Glass Media, publisher of The
Centennial History of Port Arthur, which was
released before Christmas 1997.
“His dream, right from the very start, was to get
grain, cattle, lumber and goods in and out of the
Midwest,” said Cate, a native of Mena, Arkansas,
which was named for the wife of Stilwell’s friend
and business associate Jan de Goeijen, a Dutch
name that has been anglicized into DeQueen.
Today an avenue and an elementary school in Port
Arthur are named for her.
Before the railroad was built, weeks of
overland travel were necessary for products
from the Midwest to arrive on the Southeast
Texas Gulf Coast. In many cases, grain and other
perishables rotted from being exposed to
elements along the arduous journey. Stilwell’s
dream, Cate said, “was to get it down there in
two or three days.”
Whether stone or lumber, fertile ground
or water, Stilwell used the resources available
to create towns and resorts along his
railroad. He even solicited editors, offering to
finance newspapers in new towns along the
route in return for assistance in promoting the
new settlements.
The birth of the Port Arthur News, the city’s
last remaining daily newspaper, came as a
result of a Stilwell invitation. The News actually
predates the city by a year; its first edition was
printed in a railroad car en route to Port Arthur
in March 1897.
When Stilwell began his million-dollar
advertising campaign to interest people to come
to his “Magic City,” invitations were sent to
54 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL