History of Buffalo Bayou continued

While public officials and citizens both realized that numerous species of wildlife were declining, but most authorities failed to voice their opinions. With vast populations of birds migrating from northern territories, it was taken for granted that such wildlife fecundity was inexhaustible. The passenger pigeons, for example, flocked to the south in unimaginable numbers. They could be killed by the score with one blast from a double-barreled shotgun and sadly, by the turn of the century, passenger pigeons were extinct.

Settlers chose sites along the railroads that crisscrossed the area; land developers from the midwest purchased land along the new North Galveston, Houston and Kansas City Railroad, which ran east from Houston along the south side of Buffalo Bayou towards Morgan's Point and south to the mouth of Clear Creek. Harris County east of the San Jacinto River grew as an agricultural community focusing on rice. In 1880 the first telephone exchange was created and Buffalo Bayou got its first arc light in downtown Houston. In 1882, Houston Electric Light Co. organized. Houston and New York were the first cities to build electric power plants. An automobile first appeared in Houston n 1897 along the streets above Buffalo Bayou as an advertising gimmick.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the bison was extirpated from Texas. The remaining strongholds of other wildlife were finished off for meat and sport. Fragmented natural habitats could not support healthy populations of wildlife as settlers cleared millions of acres of land for cotton and corn in the late 1800s. With little crop rotation or concern for soil conservation, depletion and erosion through continuous monocropping decimated wildlife habitats.

Japanese immigrants were invited around the turn of the century, to the area to develop rice farms on the flat prairies and also at a site on a branch line of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway south of Houston that became Mykawa.

• 1900 - the devastating "great storm," hurricane and tidal wave, struck Galveston claiming 8,000 lives and untold property damage.
• 1902 - Congress appropriated $1 million for work on the Houston Ship Channel to create a safer inland port facility.
• 1903 - oil was discovered on the eastern shore of the San Jacinto estuary at Goose Creek and Tabbs Bay.
• 1905 - an oil boom on Moonshine Hill increased the population near the Houston East and West Texas Railway. These developments put Houston and Buffalo Bayou in the center of new oil and oilfield equipment development.
• 1905 - Houston boasted of 80 automobiles. in.
• 1911 - the Galveston-Houston Electric Railway, called “The Interurban”, ran parallel to the GH&H and provided thirty-minute service from Webster to Houston.
• 1911 - The development of Buffalo Bayou as an industrial magnet surged in, when voters approved the formation of the Harris County Ship Channel Navigation District. Authorized by Congress and approved by the state legislature, the district could improve the waterway and manage the waterfront within the county.

It immediately issued bonds to widen and deepen the channel in order to make the Houston port accessible to oceangoing vessels

1914 - the United States Army Corps of Engineers finished deepening the existing fifty-mile-long channel to twenty-five feet from the Gulf through Galveston Bay and up the San Jacinto River and Buffalo Bayou to the district's turning basin at the Port of Houston.

Migrant roughnecks and their families had moved to the area and established a temporary oil camp boomtown amid the derricks between 1915 and 1917. The shantytown was replaced in 1917 by Pelly, which was built on private land above the noisy and dirty oil camp.

A National Guard Training Camp named for Civil War General John A. Logan, established in July of 1917, employed thousands of Houston residents who built roads, wooden warehouses, offices, mess halls, stables, showers and canvas topped sleeping quarters in the woods west of the turn in Washington Road. Completed in 1918, Camp Logan trained over 30,000 infantry and artillery soldiers and contributed approximately $60,000 a week to the Houston economy. After the Armistice, Camp Logan was designated a demobilization center and convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers. The camp’s American Red Cross building served as a charity hospital until the site was deeded to the city in 1924 by the family of former Governor James Hogg to become Memorial Park in honor of the camp’s soldiers who died in World War I.

By 1918 petroleum refineries were locating along Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River, as did various other industries. In 1919 Ross Sterling and his Humble Oil and Refining Company (now Exxon) built a refinery on the San Jacinto River. Oil refineries proliferated along the Ship Channel in the 1920s, taking advantage of the inexpensive waterborne shipping.

The development of oil fields poured quick wealth into the city; natural gas, sulfur, salt, and limestone deposits later laid the basis for mammoth chemical production. In 1926 the first natural gas was piped into Houston.

In 1934 the Intracoastal Canal was created to link Houston to the Mississippi River navigation system.

The 1940’s witnessed rapid expansion and significant development. During WWII the forerunner to the Brown & Root Company built housing along Buffalo Bayou for workers in the shipbuilding industry.

In 1941, a new master plan for Houston thoroughfares emphasized a loop system and in 1947 engineering began on the Gulf Freeway, Texas' first freeway which is still not complete.

The Texas Medical Center was founded in 1943 and in 1948, The Port of Houston was ranked second nationally in total tonnage. Houston entered the television broadcast market in 1949 when KLEE-TV broadcasted the first Houston commercial TV program.

In 1953, KUHT-TV, the nation's first public broadcast TV station, went on the air. By 1955, the Houston metro area population reached 1,000,000.

NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center moved to Houston in 1962, and in 1969,"Houston" was the first word spoken from the lunar surface.

In the late 1960’s Houston was considered the fastest growing city in the world. More than 200 major firms moved headquarters, subsidiaries, and divisions to Houston in the 1970s. In 1973, the Arab oil embargo quadrupledoil prices in 90 days, fueling Houston's 1973-1981 economic boom. In 1978, voters approved and funded The Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Employment surpassed 1.5 million in March, 1982, just before the onset of a major recession. In 1983, 155 new office buildings were completed. The trough of the recession was in January, 1987 with net recession loss of a quarter of a million jobs. It was in 1990, That Houston experienced a job recovery, with the May job count topping the March 1982, level.

Houston hosted the 16th annual Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations in 1990. In 1991, Houston City Council mandated development of the first zoning regulations.

A second loop, Beltway 8, was constructed to allow traffic to move around the perimeter of the urban sector. Both loops have high-rise bridges over Buffalo Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel. A third new high-rise bridge spans the San Jacinto River and a controversial third loop is in early phases of construction.

Not long ago, Texas was carpeted with virgin forests, prairie grasses and delicate wetland flora and fauna. Today the minute remains of that heritage faces daily encroachment by development. Habitat has been destroyed by activities such as channelization, draining, and leveeing of rivers and bayous, disposal of the materials from dredging of channels and marinas, and draining to fill wetlands. Loss or alteration of wetland habitat transforms the natural good management of water and destroys areas where many species live or breed.

In an incredibly short time period the rate of destruction and extinction has been excessively accelerated by the actions of man. This stems in large part from the prevailing behavior that treats wilderness and nature as little more than impediments to be overcome. Today, more than ever, a more positive approach is essential to protect and preserve the environment that supports all of life.

Throughout any region endangered species are a strong indicator of an environmental crisis, the outcome of which may decide whether habitats can be maintained for humans as well as other life forms.

Treatment of sewage and industrial waste has improved considerably in the past decade, yet still accounts for substantial water pollutants. Heavy metals and thousands of recently invented chemicals are unable to be removed through normal water treatment, are not broken down by nature, and are non-biodegradable. Other hazards, including leachate from hazardous waste storage sites and landfills, and deposition of pollutants from the air, have very tangible health and economic impacts. Airborne toxins eventually poison the land and water, killing fish, wildlife and endangering human health.

Habitability remains a basic and challenging issue that society faces. The question remains whether growing numbers of threats to habitability will escalate, or be successfully resolved. The disappearance of various species can have a dominoe effect causing the loss of other native species. What is the long-term impact? The value of what is lost may be too complex to be completely comprehended. Wildlife diversity is equal to habitat diversity. Wildlife populations cannot be restored if there is no habitat left to support them.

Each time one link in the web of life is damaged; every other form of life is disrupted and endangered as a consequence. It is essential to remember that all living things are interconnected and interdependent, and that the destruction of any one component of the web of nature can have profound implications for all the rest, especially humans. We are a dependent part of nature, not removed from it.

It is especially hopeful to consider that if work is planned with proper care to avoid development that compromises water management avoid further contamination of the water, and provides for habitat preservation, this will help improve habitability along Buffalo Bayou. The net effects of this planning will achieve not only improved habitability but also help it to become one of the greenest inner-city waterways in the world. These efforts will allow Buffalo Bayou to once again take its rightful place in history as truly being a “river of dreams.”