Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

SABINE PASS
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Above: A tall ship at Sabine Pass,
c. 1897.
Below: The Southern Pacific
locomotive Old Mother Hubbard
carried freight and passengers to
Sabine Pass.
Sabine Pass, Texas, thirty miles southeast of
Beaumont in extreme southeastern Jefferson
County, was organized by the Sabine City
Company and first known as Sabine City. The
town site was laid out as early as 1836 and was
projected to be a major Gulf seaport.
The first steam sawmill in Jefferson County
was built there in 1846, and the Sabine City post
office was established by 1847. By the time of the
Civil War, Sabine Pass had become a boomtown
with major shipments of cattle and cotton. With
a newspaper, The Sabine Pass Times, and a
connection on the Eastern Texas Railroad, the
post office adopted the more commonly used
name of Sabine Pass and the town was
incorporated on June 15, 1861. Sabine, Griffin
and Manhassett Forts were constructed during
the war to fend off Union attacks there.
An outbreak of yellow fever led most residents
to evacuate in 1862, and dissuaded Union troops
that had landed near the city and destroyed the
sawmill from permanently occupying the area. In
the Battle of Sabine Pass, Lieutenant Dick
Dowling and forty-six of his men used six
cannons to halt another Union invasion in 1863,
capturing two Union gunboats, the Clifton and
the Sachem, and 200 prisoners. The gunboats
later became Confederate blockade-runners.
By 1880, Sabine Pass was the second largest
town in Jefferson County with 460 inhabitants,
and its future looked bright when the Sabine and
East Texas Railroad was constructed to replace the
older rail line abandoned during the Civil War.
Disaster struck in 1886, when a hurricane
barreled through the town, killing eighty-six
people. Other storms in 1900 and 1915
emphasized the town’s exposed position on the
Gulf Coast, beginning a decline that continued
when the Kountze brothers, major landowners in
the area, refused to sell land to prospective
developer Arthur E. Stilwell. Construction of
the Port Arthur Ship Channel in 1897-98,
the subsequent growth of Port Arthur, and the
construction of additional deepwater ports at
Beaumont and Orange attracted major investors to
these rival cities, and Sabine Pass never achieved
the prominence its founders had anticipated.
In the wake of the Spindletop oil boom in
1901, the Sun Oil Company built docks and a
pumping plant at Sabine Pass, but discontinued
these operations in 1927. The Union Sulphur
Company, which also built large docks in Sabine
Pass, received trainloads of sulfur each day from
their mines in Sulphur, Louisiana. Commercial
fishing and marine repair remained major
local industries.
With the decline of the Spindletop oil field,
ships began importing crude oil through Sabine
Pass via the Sabine-Neches Waterway to sustain
Jefferson County’s existing petrochemical
industry. Rice, cotton, rubber products, steel,
78 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL