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A Texas ghost town yields hard hurricane lessons

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Once a thriving port city with a population of at least 5,000, Indianola today is home to several dozen residents living in beach houses on the bay.
Once a thriving port city with a population of at least 5,000, Indianola today is home to several dozen residents living in beach houses on the bay.

INDIANOLA - Spawned southwest of the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, the nameless monster from the sea devastated Haiti and Jamaica and battered Key West, and when it slammed into Matagorda Bay on the night of Sept. 15, 1875, it wiped a vital Texas town off the earth. While Hurricane Harvey and the ensuing flood may or may not permanently alter Houston and southeast Texas, the hurricane that destroyed Indianola changed the face of Texas.

Indianola was an accidental city, founded by German immigrants who landed in Texas in 1844 before Prince Karl zu Solms-Braunfels was ready for them. Dropped off during a cold, wet November at a spit of land in Matagorda Bay called Indian Point, some stayed when their fellow immigrants began the hard trek to Central Texas and beyond toward Friedrichsburg. The remaining families founded what they eventually would call Indianola (Indian for Indian Point; ola, Spanish for wave).

Within a few years, Indianola had become something of a forerunner to the Panama Canal for traders and travelers headed to California. Sailing ships from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pensacola and New Orleans crowded the town's four wharves. They discharged their assorted cargoes for Texas beyond the Colorado River and took on raw materials for the industrial northeast. Hay from the Guadalupe River Valley, cotton from coastal Texas and wool from Saxon sheep on Hill Country farms shipped out of Indianola.

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Soon an economic rival to Galveston, the busy deep-water port became a major point of embarkation for trade with Santa Fe and Chihuahua. In 1847, Charles Morgan of New York launched the first in a line of sailing ships plying between Indianola and New York. A couple of years later, 49ers trudging to California with gold dust in their eyes headed west from the town on Matagorda Bay. Thousands of European refugees fleeing political turmoil and economic distress first set foot in America at Indianola. A number of German immigrants stayed.

"The influence of the large German population was apparent in the cleanliness of the town, which was a bilingual community from the start," historian Brownson Malsch wrote in his 1977 book "Indianola: The Mother of Western Texas." "Many of the older immigrants who settled at Indian Point lived out their life span without learning English."

White shell streets

Oleander bushes blossomed all over town, contrasting nicely with the white shell streets. Houses painted white, light blue, green and yellow reminded visitors of the Caribbean. Large hotels with fine restaurants attracted visitors from all over. The Alhambra, known for its luxurious accommodations, was perhaps the best known. Operated by Casimir Villeneuve, a young Frenchman in his 30s, and his even-younger wife Matilda, a Kentuckian, the Alhambra featured an oyster saloon, a billiard room and a bar featuring fine wines and a variety of liquors.

During the Civil War, both Confederate and Union troops occupied the town, but it recovered soon after a federal blockade of Matagorda Bay was lifted in June 1865. A few years later, Frances Stabler, an Indianolan originally from Baltimore, developed a process for canning raw meat by using carbonic acid gas. By the early 1870s, shippers out of Indianola were doing a brisk business in canned meat, cattle hides and live cattle.

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The week of the storm, the Calhoun County Courthouse was the scene of a spectacular murder trial, and hundreds of people in town for the trial waited too late to get out. As midnight approached, wharves began breaking apart, sturdy brick buildings were coming unmoored from their foundations, houses were collapsing. Amidst the deafening roar of wind and surf, desperate people either sought shelter or tried to row to safety on skiffs, lumber or lashed-together cotton bales. Children drowned in their parents' arms.

Town bounces back

After the eye's brief respite, the wind from the opposite direction was even worse. The tide changed direction, and millions of tons of water came rushing back toward the bay. What was left of Indianola was borne out to sea.

At least 300 people lost their lives. For days, ships sailing into Matagorda Bay encountered floating bits of broken furniture, wrecks of buildings, wharf lumber, trees, animal carcasses and an occasional human body.

Indianolans rebuilt, and for the next decade "the Queen City of the West" thrived yet again, less on trade as before and more on tourism. The town touted opportunities for fishing, yachting and bathing in the clear waters of Matagorda Bay. Seafood restaurants reopened, and what was said to be one of the most beautiful beach drives on the Gulf Coast offered fresh and invigorating sea breezes.

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It was not to be. On Aug. 20, 1886, an even stronger hurricane destroyed all that had been rebuilt. That was enough for most survivors.

In November, the courthouse moved to Port Lavaca. Remaining houses were transported by rail and rebuilt in Victoria, Port Lavaca and Cuero. (Jeff Wright, executive director of Victoria Preservation, Inc., told me the Indianola houses survived Hurricane Harvey.)

Without a rival, Galveston prospered as never before, until that cataclysmic moment in 1900, when the Great Storm not only killed thousands of people but also shifted the focus of industry and commerce to a striving, thriving city 40 miles northward.

Today, Indianola is a ghost town. Its only residents live across the road from an ugly, riprap breakwater in modest beach houses on stilts at least 15 feet high. Harvey inflicted minimal damage.

George Anne Cormier, director of the Calhoun County Museum in Port Lavaca, has lived along that beach for years. "It's beautiful here, and people are still moving in," she says, although she predicts the time will come when the state won't allow people to build near the water's edge. Indianola will become a bird sanctuary.

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A monstrous howl

At dusk one evening last week I leaned against a carved granite rock, about 50 yards down the beach from Cormier's house. The rock commemorates the location of the old Calhoun County Courthouse, now 50 feet offshore. On cold winter days at low tide, the old building's foundation stones are still visible. With the quietness broken by gentle waves lapping against the jumbled riprap, I could almost hear the monstrous howl of a killing storm, the roar rendering mute the screams of desperate people. I remembered a warning from the post-script of the only book-length account of Indianola's colorful history.

"In time," the late Malsch wrote, "new catastrophes comparable to those of Indianola in 1875 and 1886, of Galveston in 1900, of Corpus Christi in 1919, of hurricane Carla in 1961, to name only a few, will overwhelm parts of the Texas coast. When? Who knows? One can only say with certainty that they will come."

Malsch chided coastal Texans for ignoring "the examples [Indianolans] set and the lessons they were harshly taught." More than 40 years after he penned those words, his warning goes unheeded.

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Joe Holley has been the “Native Texan” columnist for the Houston Chronicle since 2013. A native Texan himself – from Waco – he’s been an editorial page editor in San Diego, Calif., a contributor to Texas Monthly, a speechwriter for Gov. Ann Richards, a staff writer for The Washington Post and an editorial writer for the Chronicle from 2012 to 2017. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 for a series of editorials on gun control and the Texas gun culture and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2022, as part of the Houston Chronicle editorial team that produced a series of editorials on Donald Trump's "Big Lie."
He’s the author of six books, including Hometown Texas, a collection of his weekly “Native Texan” columns; Hurricane Season: The Unforgettable Story of the Houston Astros and the Resilience of a City; and Sutherland Springs: God, Guns and a Small Texas Town, published in 2020 and recipient of the 2021 Carr P. Collins Award, presented by the Texas Institute of Letters in recognition of the year’s best work of nonfiction. The book explores the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2017.