GalvestonHistory.info

The University of Texas Medical School (now Ashbel Smith Hall) is on the National Registry of Historic Places

Excerpt from Galveston: A History of the Island by Gary Cartwright:

Part of the price of being a seaport in the 1800s was the certainty that killer storms and periodic epidemics of yellow fever would extract awesome tolls. It was difficult—though not impossible—to talk about tropical paradises when the smell of black vomit hung over the Island, and the clang of church bells mourning the dead barely overrode the moans of those yet to die. In the deadly days of summer, when the yellow-fever epidemic was claiming up to twenty lives a day, the bitter irony came crashing home. And still there was a reluctance on the part of the government and the business community to acknowledge the obvious. Quarantines, of course, were bad for business. For years medical experts on the Island claimed that quarantines weren’t effective—when in fact quarantines were the only remedy that was effective. When an epidemic hit Galveston in 1870, Houston sent its militia out with shotguns and bludgeons to stop trains from Galveston, with orders to tear up the tracks if necessary. Islanders yelled that Houston was using the quarantine for its own profit, but six years later Galveston did the same thing to New Orleans, halting trade because an epidemic had swept the Crescent City.

The ultimate irony, however, was the boldness with which Island leaders used yellow fever to court a new industry. According to historian David G. McComb, this is how the University of Texas Medical Branch came to be located in Galveston: In 1880 when the University of Texas was looking for a place to establish its medical school, four cities were in competition—Galveston, Houston, Austin, and Tyler. Galveston had the size and wealth to support such a facility, not to mention a $50,000 grant from the estate of John Sealy, Sr., to build a teaching hospital. Opponents argued that Galveston was vulnerable to hurricanes and yellow fever. Quite right, responded Dr. Ashbel Smith, which is exactly why the Island is such a perfect location. “Students need practical as well as theoretical experience,” argued Smith, who was president of the Texas Medical Association at the time. The legislature agreed, and in 1891 the new medical school opened. For a hundred years now it has been among the Island’s major employers.

John Sealy’s executors used the money he left to build a teaching hospital for the University of Texas Medical Department that the Texas legislature had authorized in 1881. Nicholas Clayton designed the building. The John Sealy Hospital was finished by the time the medical school began conducting classes in 1891.

The original John Sealy Hospital facility		Nicholas Clayton also designed the original classroom building for the University of Texas Medical Department. This is the Ashbel Smith building, also known as “Old Red.” The original hospital building was replaced a long time ago, but the Ashbel Smith building has been restored, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Old Red The 1965 Master Development Plan called for its demolition. Thereafter, Old Red was closed down, section by section. No maintenance was performed. The great anatomy amphitheater in the rounded east wing beacme home to hundreds of pigeons (and hundreds of decomposing pigeon bodies). The university’s elevated service network was built up against the back of Old Red, and incompatible new construction closed in on it. University alumni, faculty, and the Galveston Historical Foundation pressed for Old Red’s rehabilitation. Finally, in 1983, the University of Texas system authorized rehabilitation of the Medical Department Building. From: Galveston: Architecture Guidebook
The Ashbel Smith Building "Old Red" was the original University of Texas Medical School UTMB’s Old Red

Further reading:
Galveston: A History by David G. McComb
Clayton’s Galveston: The Architecture of Nicholas J. Clayton and His Contemporaries by Barrie Scardino, Drexel Turner

Photos are courtesy of Rosenberg Library and University of Texas Medical Branch

Technorati Tags: Galveston history

Texas Heroes Monument (Old Linen Post Card)

The Texas Heroes Monument was one of the bequests of Henry Rosenberg (for whom 25th Street was renamed in 1897) to the city of Galveston. It sits in the intersection of Broadway and Rosenberg Avenue. The trustees of Rosenberg’s estate commissioned the sculptor, Louis Amateis, of Washington, D.C. to produce this 72-foot-high bronze and granite monument commemorating those who fought in the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836.

The bronze statue of Victory atop the columned shaft extends her crown of laurels in the direction of the San Jacinto battlefield, fifty miles north of Galveston, along Buffalo Bayou, where the army of Anglo-Texians under General Sam Houston surprised and captured the forces of Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna in 1836. The battle victory forced Santa Anna to concede the independence of Texas from Mexico. The monument was dedicated on San Jacinto Day, 21 April 1900, by Govenor Joseph D. Sayers. Read about the monument in the Galveston: Architecture Guidebook

The statue of Victory atop the Texas Heroes Monument points toward the bay, and past that, toward the San Jacinto Battlegrounds on the mainland.

Related Article: Post Office Street
A gallery of photographs of the monument showing much of the detail

Technorati Tags: Galveston Galveston history

There was a brief article in the Friday, September 7, 1900 issue of The Daily News noting that a storm was raging in the Gulf of Mexico; but the reader had to search diligently to find it: nine lines at the very bottom of the page, just above an illustrated ad for Royal Baking Powder. It was datelined Jacksonville, and it described high winds and downing of telegraph wires. The storm was “said to be northwest of Key West, Florida.” But at the time it was published the news was already trailing far behind actual events. In fact, the eye of the hurricane was near New Orleans, and moving fast.

At the office of the United States Weather Bureau on the third floor of the Levy Building on Market Street, the meteorologists had been monitoring the reports of the storm. They had already raised the city’s storm warning flags.

The Weather Bureau chief was Isaac M. Cline, a native of Tennessee. Raised on the farm and college educated, Cline had decided early to make a career out of the weather. He was trained by the weather service climatologists of the army Signal Corps. His first assignment was Little Rock, Arkansas. There, at the University of Arkansas, he earned a medical degree. In 1885, he was sent to Abeline, Texas, where he married a church organist, Cora Mae Bellew. Soon their first daughter was born.   In 1889, Isaac Cline was sent to set up and organize an office of the weather service in Galveston and he was running the office when the service became a branch of the U. S. Department of Agriculture in 1891.

Dr. Isaac Cline

By 1900, Isaac and Cora Cline had become well established in the oleander city. He was well respected as a climatolologist and educator at the medical school. (He was a pioneer in the field of Medical Climatology.) The Cline family had grown to include three daughters: Allie May, Esther and Rosemary. And now Cora was expecting a fourth child.

Early on Friday the weather service informed Cline by telegraph that a hurricane had smashed across Florida and was at sea somewhere between the Galveston and New Orleans weather stations. By midnight September 7 the moon was bright and there was no apparent sign of storm. There was only a slight wind. The weatherman noticed, however, long swells breaking on the beach with an ominous roar, and a tide rising above normal height.

“The storm swells were increasing in magnitude and frequency and were building up a storm tide which told me as plainly as though it was a written message that a great danger was approaching.”

By dawn Saturday, the high tide, some two feet over normal, began creeping over the lower parts of the island. The barometer slowly dropped, and Cline, contrary to department procedures, harnessed a horse to his two-wheeled cart and headed down to the beach to warn people to seek high ground.

By mid-afternoon—with the storm tide still rising—he sent his brother Joseph to inform the weather headquarters in Washington, D.C., that Galveston was going under and to request aid. Joseph Cline waded through the streets to the telephone exchange. He was able to get the message through to Houston shortly before the line went dead. With that, the Cline brothers waded to Isaac’s house to wait out the storm.

Isaac Cline’s book: Storms, Floods, and Sunshine: Isaac Monroe Cline : An Autobiography With a Summary of Tropical Hurricanes

It was about a two-mile walk to the Cline residence. The Clines lived at 2511 Avenue Q, just three blocks north of the Gulf. As was common in Galveston, their home was built on stilts as a precaution against overflows from the ocean. The Cline house was just four years old and was specially braced to withstand hurricanes. Over fifty people were huddled there on the second floor, includung Isaac Cline’s pregnant wife and children. Neighbors felt safer there, and even the builders took refuge there. At five the anemometer at the weather station recorded a two-minute gust at 102 miles per hour. Fifteen minutes later the wind carried the instrument away. Now the storm was intensifying with each minute. By six the tide was swelling at an incredible rate of 2½ feet an hour, and the wind was shifting around to the northeast. At about seven-thirty, in a single enormous swell, the tide rose four feet in four seconds. The eye of the storm passed west of the island between eight and nine P.M. By then the velocity of the wind was estimated at 120 miles per hour. The tide on the Gulf side of the island was at least fifteen feet, and breakers twenty-five feet or higher crashed over the beachline.

The whole town was awash, but the houses on their stilted foundations stood above the waves. Debris, however, piled up around the structures and dammed the water.

 

Though the front and rear porches of Isaac Cline’s home had been smashed to sticks, the refugees inside told themselves that the house was secure. Never-the-less, Joseph Cline remembered that the people around him were singing or praying or crying—or wandering around aimlessly, looking for some place that might give them an advantage when the end came.

“I knew the house was about to collapse,” Joseph Cline said, “and I told my relatives and friends to get on top of the drift and float with it.”

The storm had been pounding against a quarter-mile-long section of streetcar trestle built out over the Gulf. The trestle together with ties, cross pieces, and fifty foot rails was soon uprooted. It moved, lashed, floated, and rolled in the fury of the storm. The trestle battered the Cline house, turned it over, and beat it to pieces.

Just before the collision, Isaac Cline felt his house move off its foundation. Then it began to topple and break apart. His brother Joseph had been standing near a window on the windward side. When the house began to capsize, he grabbed the hands of two of Isaac’s daughters and smashed through the glass and wooden shutters of the window with his back. Joseph and his nieces were alone on the side of the overturned house. Rain was driving down, and pieces of timber and wreckage rushed by. Isaac Cline, his wife, and their youngest daughter were in the center of the room when it turned over. They were pinned by wreckage and carried under. He lost consciousness. When he came to he found himself hanging between two timbers: the wave action against the timbers apparently pressed the water out of his lungs. There was a flash of lightning and Cline saw his youngest girl alive and floating on the wreckage a few feet away. His wife was gone. A short time later another flash revealed his brother and his other two daughters, still riding their raft of debris.

Related Articles A Weekend in September 1900 The 1900 Storm: Audio and Visual Records The Seawall Raising The Grade Isaac Cline’s wife and daughters

“I took my baby and swam toward them,” Isaac Cline recalled. “Strange as it may seem these children displayed no sign of fear, as we in the shadow of death did not realize what fear meant. Our only thought was how to win in this disaster.”

For hours they drifted through endless darkness and dispair. They clung to the trestle. Over the downpour and wail of wind, they heard houses being crushed and the screams of the dying, and they rescued a seven-year-old girl from the waves. Drifting out to sea and back, they moved to various pieces of flotsam as necessary and finally grounded on a long line of debris at 28th Street and Avenue P. In its grinding fashion the storm constructed a breakwater of wreckage stretching roughly from the eastern end of the city to 45th street and parallel to the Gulf about six blockes from the beach. The hurricane destroyed everything outside of this—about one-third of the city, 1,500 acres.

---

This map graphically shows the levels of damage Galveston sustained as a result of the hurricane. The beachfront (the shaded portion of the city closest to the Gulf of Mexico) was completely lost. A swath of complete destruction, roughly bounded by 8th Street (east), 46th Street (west), and Avenue O (north), was the next level. Few buildings survived there. A zone of partial destruction, including the waterfront and the downtown area, occupied the innermost portion of Galveston.

---

From the debris wall the brothers and four children clambered through the upstairs window of a house and stayed there, huddled with others, for the remainder of the nightmare. They were among the few who escaped the Cline house. Two weeks later searchers working in the planks and timbers at 28th and P found the body of Mrs. Cline. Entangled in the wreckage of her home, underwater, she had traveled with her family to the point where the living found safety.

 

The seven-year-old, Cora Goldbeck, whom the brothers pulled from the water had been visiting her grandparents with her mother. They were all dead, and the Clines promised to care for her. Several weeks later, in a drugstore, Joseph Cline met a grief-stricken man from San Antonio who was looking for his lost family. He asked their name, and, happily, Cora was reunited with her family.

Read Joseph Cline’s book: When the Heavens Frowned

Related articles:
A Weekend in September 1900
The 1900 Storm: Audio and Visual Records
The Seawall
Raising The Grade

Technorati Tags: 1900 storm Galveston Galveston history Galveston hurricane

A post card image of the Galveston seawall under construction

The following is an excerpt from Galveston: A History by David G. McComb.

During construction [of the seawall] in the early part of the century it became popular to “promenade” atop the unfinished seawall, especially on Sunday. Boys set up ladders and charged five cents to use them. One opportunistic group of men and women used a ladder while the owner’s back was turned, but the boy charged them to get down. A reporter commented that this form of enterprise would give Galveston a reputation for “bleeding its excursionists.”

Women and girls, for the most part, would not go onto the wall because they would have to climb a ladder. In a day when ladies wore full skirts and the glimpse of an ankle was a thrill for men, ladders were a risqué business. Yet thousands of females wished to inspect “their” wall, and not all were forestalled. A reporter observed an intrepid “Miss Girl” who scrambled up a short ladder and hoisted herself three more feet to the top of the wall while she thought no one was looking. Then a band of boys saw “Miss Girl” at the same time she saw them. They all rushed to the ladder, but the boys reached it first and offered to hold it steady while she came down. “There is one thing a girl will not do. She will not climb a ladder while a boy is down below holding it.” Undaunted, she raced along the wall for three hundred feet and jumped off into a pile of sand. None of the boys would have jumped from that height. She landed on her feet, “kissed her hand” to the disappointed gang, and disappeared down a side street.

Related article: The Seawall

Links:
Seawall Exhibit—Galveston and Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library
Post-storm rebuilding considered ‘Galveston’s finest hour’—1900storm.com
Construction of the Seawall—IslandOfGalveston.com
The Galveston Seawall—TheRealGalveston.com

Technorati Tags: Galveston Galveston history seawall

The most popular resort on the seawall in 1927 was the Crystal Palace. It was across 23rd Street from the site where the Buccaneer Hotel was built the following year. The Crystal Palace had arcades and cafes, dressing rooms, a swimming pool, and a walkway over the boulevard to the beach.

The Crystal Palace Plunge

Technorati Tags: Galveston Galveston history

After the devastating hurricane that flattened the city of Galveston and left thousands of people dead in its wake, the citizens of Galveston county were determined to build a protective seawall at the beach. But engineers had advised the city leaders that a seawall, by itself, wouldn’t be enough to protect them from another major storm. They were told that the entire level of the city would have to be raised as well.

It took planning, money, and time, yet the city of Galveston did manage to raise itself to a higher level on its island. And in so doing, began its resurgence.

Before and after grade-raising. The area to the right has been filled while the buildings on the left are being prepared for the process. The bracing in the side yard of the two-story house is supporting a fence. The pipes will be used to pump fill into the area.

There were two problems to conquer:

• Raising the city itself: the buildings, out-buildings, utilities, and streets.
• Obtaining and distributing the fill material.

Most buildings were meticulously raised by hundreds of jackscrews moving ¼ inch at a time. Some, like Ashton Villa (the brick mansion on Broadway), were simply filled around the ground-level floors, making them into basements. The three-thousand-ton St. Patrick’s Church was uplifted five feet with 700 jackscrews without disrupting services.

Filling was accomplished in quarter-mile-square sections. Each area was enclosed in a dike, and then all structures, sewers, water mains, and gas lines were lifted. Property owners had to arrange for raising their homes and businesses, but the city paid for raising the grade of yards, streets, and utilities.

Raising St. Patrick’s Church 5 feet.

The problem of obtaining fill material was solved by using self-loading hopper dredges brought in from the low countries of Europe. The dredge boats removed silt from the bay, moved through temporary canals cut into the island, and deposited the fluid sand material by pipes where it was needed. The filled areas took weeks and months to dry out.

Individuals even jacked up gravestones and attempted to save trees and shrubs, however most of the trees perished. Fresh landscape materials and topsoil was eventually transported from the mainland.

During the years of the grade raising, citizens of Galveston learned to maneuver about the city, their homes and businesses over raised frame catwalks and trestles eight to ten feet in the air.

The grade raising was not finished until 1910.

Links:
Grade Raising Exhibit—Galveston and Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library
Post-storm rebuilding considered ‘Galveston’s finest hour’—1900storm.com
Grade Raising: 1904-1910—IslandOfGalveston.com
The Grade Raising—TheRealGalveston.com

Technorati Tags: 1900 storm Galveston Galveston history

This article is provided courtesy of Ed Hertel.

The famous Hollywood Dinner Club was the first of its kind in the coastal city of Galveston, Texas. Located on Stewart Street and 61st Street, just outside the official city limits, the Hollywood Dinner Club (HDC) was a fancy building with the clientele to match.

Built by Ollie Quinn with a dream to take gambling out of the seedy sawdust joints, the HDC was constructed with the best in mind. It has the claim to fame as the first air-conditioned club. In order to make the club into a gamblers paradise, Ollie enlisted a gambler by the name of Jackie Friedman to become his partner in the club. His input would build the foundation for the club, but it wouldn’t shine until the Maceo brothers, Rose and Sam, bought out Friedman’s share. The Maceos, who were poor immigrants turned rich bootleggers, turned the club into the nicest place in town.

Hollywood Dinner Club Post Card

The Maceos knew the importance of entertainment and hired Hollywood’s latest and greatest to appear. People like Guy Lombardo, Paul Whiteman, Shep Fields, and Duke Ellington were favorites. It is claimed that the very first live broadcast was aired on NBC from the Hollywood Dinner Club with special guest Ben Bernie.

To keep the money rolling in, the HDC was equipped with a casino in the back which offered games of chance. Craps, blackjack and roulette were known to have existed there. Sam Maceo, the ever personal host of the club, screened gamblers and only let the cream of the crop through - which wasn’t difficult since there was big money coming in from the oil fields of Texas at the time.

After the Maceo brothers turned their attention to the Turf Athletic Club, the HDC started a time of decline. Finally on June 19, 1957, the club was raided and over 1,000 slot machines were confiscated from the club. Empty and unused, the club burned down on August 13, 1959.

Technorati Tags: Galveston history Hollywood Dinner Club

The Galveston City Railway was operating mule drawn street cars in Galveston as early as 1866. The Peoples Street Railway started operating in 1874. The two companies merged in 1879. The resulting Galveston City Street Railway Company had fifty employees, 30 cars and 140 mules. The offices and stable were at the corner of 21st Street and Avenue I. The fare was 5 cents.

The company started converting to electric trolleys in 1889, but the conversion was interrupted by the 1900 storm. The last mules were not retired until 1905. Today’s trolleys are diesel powered, and are operated by Island Transit. The tracks run between Seawall Boulevard and the Strand, the harbor, and the UTMB campus.

Technorati Tags: Galveston history Galveston seawall the Strand trolley

Since Galveston’s earliest days, Avenue B has been known as the Strand. The Strand was the primary commercial street in downtown Galveston. In its heyday this street was home to banks, merchantile businesses, and factoring companies, and was considerded to be to Galveston what Wall Street was to Manhattan.

But the hurricane of 1900 and the comming of the Houston Ship Channel adversly affected the history of the Strand area of Galveston. The entire downtown area of the city began to change into a run-down, deserted, used-to-be commerical center. The interesting thing is that the atrophy of the downtown center of Galveston did something that would otherwise never have happened. It preserved a remarkable collection of Victorian iron-front commercial buildings.

Today those restored buildings are recognized as the Strand National Historic Landmark District. A revitalized Strand area is now Galveston’s popular shopping destination. It is home to restaurants, museums, specialty stores, souvenir shops, antique stores and galleries.

Technorati Tags: Galveston Galveston history shopping the Strand

The 1900 storm reduced much of the city to rubble, and resulted in the loss of many thousands of lives. In the months following the hurricane, city leaders began to seek a solution to the island’s natural vunerability. The city hired General H. M. Robert and two other engineers to devise some means of protecting the city from future storms. The engineers advised that a seawall, accompanied by raising the grade of the island, would provide the desired protection.

In 1902, the city of Galveston—with financing provided by the county—began construction of a seawall to protect the city from future devistation by flooding.

The county awarded the contract for construction of a seawall to the Denver firm of J. M. O’Rourke and Company. Construction began on October 27, 1902. A cornerstone was laid in February 1903. The seawall was built of sand, cement, and stone around a network of pilings and reinforcing bars. The original section was sixteen feet wide at the base, five feet wide at the top, and seventeen feet tall. Big blocks of granite were placed in front of the wall to break the force of the sea.

Construction of the seawall was completed on July 30, 1904.

Originally, the seawall curved along the east end of the island between 6th and 8th streets toward the south jetty. This area in the city has since been filled and is part of the street system.

The contractors placed this granite marker on the seawall when they finished their work in 1904. It still stands at the seaward end of 23rd Street beside what is left of Murdoch’s Pier.

The granite plaque is clearly visible in this old photograph of Seawall Boulevard activity.

Related article: Building The Seawall

Links:
Seawall Exhibit—Galveston and Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library
Post-storm rebuilding considered ‘Galveston’s finest hour’—1900storm.com
Construction of the Seawall—IslandOfGalveston.com
The Galveston Seawall—TheRealGalveston.com

Technorati Tags: Galveston Galveston seawall seawall seawall boulevard