Ghosts of Brownwood

A recent visit to the Baytown Nature Center
(Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Jerry Hamby)

Twenty-five years ago, one of my colleagues at Lee College, a journalism instructor named Susan, led me on a driving tour of the old Brownwood subdivision, located on a 500-acre peninsula that juts into the Houston Ship Channel, which, in turn, feeds into Galveston Bay. Surrounded by three bays—Burnet, Crystal, and Scott—Brownwood has a storied past, beginning with the stately homes of Humble Oil executives who lived there in the 1940s and ending in 1983 with the devastation of Hurricane Alicia (and her eleven-foot storm surge), after which all residents were forced to leave permanently when the City of Baytown prohibited reconstruction and cut off water and electricity.

Brownwood in 1989, six years after Alicia

My first visit to Brownwood took place eight years after Alicia, by which time most of the homes had been bought and leveled. This was the same year that Baytown residents approved a $300,000 bond initiative to create wetland restoration, a project that ultimately led to the establishment of the Baytown Nature Center. A comparison of two Google Earth satellite images tells the story of Brownwood more succinctly than the dozens of newspaper narratives recounted by residents who survived several major weather events, beginning with hurricane Carla in 1961. (I discovered the two photos on the blog site Google Earth Time Machine, maintained by my good friend Brian Schrock; I direct readers there to learn more about topics related to geology and geography.)

Brownwood in 1953

The 1953 image shows what the peninsula looked like before Brownwood experienced its most extensive subsidence (the ground dropped a total of ten feet between the early 1900s and the 1980s, eight and a half feet of which dropped in the final forty years). Note how the western and southern shores of the peninsula were protected by a land barrier known as Goat Island (so named because goats grazed there after the land bridge connected to the mainland disappeared). As a side note, Goat Island was partially restored (in two segments) in 2003-2004 when the Ship Channel was widened and deepened and the dredged soil (millions of cubic acres) was moved by the Port of Houston and the U.S. Corps of Engineers on top of the original land mass. 

The topic of subsidence is complicated and fascinating, but in short, during the twentieth century the greater Houston metropolitan area sank between four and ten feet due to unrestrained extraction of groundwater (as well as oil and gas), which is now regulated to limit further subsidence. For more information on the history of Brownwood and the events that led to its demise, I suggest checking out the extensive website Houston Wet: A Sprawl Ecology. Be forewarned: you will spend a good two to three hours reading the text and scrolling through dozens of photographs, at the end of which you will have a rich appreciation for this aspect of Houston history and the downside of human enterprise. The story of Brownwood is, at its heart, a story of hubris, of lessons ignored.

Tropical storm aftermath, circa 1976 (chron.com)

When I visited Brownwood in 1991, more than 350 houses had been razed and the rubble removed. The driving tour I took with Susan was limited to "Perimeter Road," what used to be Bayshore Drive and Mapleton Avenue. In the aftermath of Carla and repeated episodes of flooding, city officials had raised the road seven feet, creating a combination dike and escape route, but the engineers based their measurements on pre-subsidence benchmarks, so the road was more than a foot too low, and it failed at keeping the water out. 

When Susan and I explored the area on foot in 1991, what I could see peeking through the overgrown vegetation were a few dozen houses, in some instances only the rooftops, that dotted a blighted landscape. I learned many years later that these structures belonged to the holdouts, the roughly three percent of residents who refused to sell their property. The Baytown Nature Center has existed since 1994 when work on the Brownwood Marsh Restoration project began. To this day there are pockets in the Nature Center that belong to former residents who refused to sell their property. Some people did not believe they were being offered fair market value for their homes while others held out on principle, fighting to the very end all attempts to dislodge them from their property. 

Boardwalk on the Golden Bloom Pond Trail, crossing a former street (July 2016)

Today there are no elevated structures, but you can still find footprints of human development—house foundations, boat docks, bulkheads, and swimming pools. Most of the streets are still visible, if overgrown, as trails take you through a variety of landscapes. If you explore the shoreline at low tide, you will find broken bricks, sections of brick walls, and shards of crockery among the riprap and oyster shells.

Crockery among oyster shells on the beach

On a recent trip to the Nature Center, I discovered the last utility pole in Brownwood, cut off at the ground and left on one of those overgrown roads. The electrical cable disappears into the overgrowth, and the pole lies on the ground, reminders of that tentative connection between civilization and wilderness.

The last utility pole—Crow Road

One of my greatest regrets about that first trip to Brownwood is the fact that I didn't take a camera. In those pre-digital days, I reserved 35-mm film for vacations and family gatherings. These days I might take hundreds of photos in a single day, so I have done a more thorough job of documenting return trips to Brownwood. In my next post I will share my most recent discoveries, including a pair of swimming pools, two of the many ghosts of Brownwood.

Looking south onto Scott Bay and the Fred Hartman Bridge