Real Texas History

Binz Building in Houston, Texas, 1895. My great-grandfather provided the brick for this "skyscraper" when no one else would take the risk. Photo is public domain.

I'm uniquely qualified to write these posts. My great-grandfather settled in Texas in 1885, moved to Houston in 1892 when there were 26,000 residents. As I've dug into his story, I'm struck by the parallels to Texas at the turn of the 20th century, and Texas now.

Follow me here to learn more about Texas before air conditioning...

  • Camp Mystic and the Guadalupe River. No one listened in 1899, 1921, or 1936. No one will listen now. Texans will keep dying in floods and will keep saying there was no way they could have predicted it.
  • Boerne, Texas: A river runs through it. Six inches of rain, poured into a dry creekbed next to Uncle Martin's shop in Boerne, was all it took to destroy a lifetime of hard work.
  • “There is no way we could have seen this coming." Houston Post, 9/14/1921: "Will the indifference of the past 76 years continue indefinitely, in spite of the painful lessons that are forced upon us year after year?"
  • “There is really, absolutely positively, no way we could have seen this coming." Houston Post, 09/30/1936: "For years we have stood by idly while this tremendous waste of human life, property and resources went on unchecked and the State was impoverished."
  • Happy birthday, Aunt WeeWee! She dared succeed in a man’s world, with grace, dignity, and joy, thrived despite the roadblocks women of her era faced. And thought nothing of it.
  • A retrospective: Cinco de Mayo pasts (Part 1). Negrete came out of retirement to fight the conservatives he had embraced. His declared his change in political affiliation with the statement: Yo tengo Patria antes que Partido, country before party.
  • A retrospective: Cinco de Mayo pasts (Part 2). Texas hasn’t always been crazy.
  • Texas as seen through the eye of its hurricanes. 1886-1900. “It is simply unparalleled and even those who went through the experience of the storm and survived are so dazed they can hardly realize the enormity of the loss.”
  • Texas as seen through the eye of its hurricanes. 1900, continued. "It is a time for courage of the highest order: it is a time when men and women show the stuff that is in them..."
  • Texas as seen through the eye of its hurricanes. 1900-1912. The seawall formed the city’s first line of defense. Raised elevation of the island was its second. And the causeway served as indestructible link to the mainland. Galveston was impregnable!
  • MURDER DONE BY TEXANS. Congressman and His Brother Shot Dead. When violence is the answer, no one wins.
  • The Rule of Reason in Texas. Not a single courageous effort to enforce the law, born of patriotism to duty and love of right, has ever gone unrewarded by the people.
  • Brownsville, Texas, August 1906 – part 1. Coming from Nebraska, where social equality is granted to negroes, they could not seem to realize that here in a southern town such privileges would certainly be denied them.-Brownsville Daily Herald.
  • Brownsville, Texas, August 1906 – part 2. As soon as they thought that Washington was granting their requests to replace Black soldiers with white, the Brownsville Daily Herald began its revisionist journalism. "We LIKED the Black soldiers!"
  • Brownsville, Texas, August 1906 – part 3. “It turns my stomach to see lefty nutcases trying to rewrite history,” the ‘brave’ letter-writer who signed his name “Bosco” said. “Let it be.” - Brownsville Daily Herald, 2006.
  • Juneteenth in Texas. We may not continue to pretend that the Civil Rights Act suffices to make up for injustices of the past. Violence against fellow Americans based on race was too frequent, too destructive to ignore.
  • Let me tell you about Mrs. Stulting (part 1). As I learned more about Mrs. Stulting, I realized we could enjoy what seemed like the most natural thing on earth because she protected her teachers and her students. I had no idea what it cost her.
  • Let me tell you about Mrs. Stulting (part 2). The Barnstones may have enjoyed enormous political and social capital, but Elsa Stulting had two things they did not (likely more): Backbone of steel, and allies within Houston School District.
  • The tragic life of Delphia Creek. Delphia caught me and made me stop working, made me think about that child who lived a nightmare. Will we ever care enough about our children to stop the George Blounts among us?
  • Natural disasters. And the next flood, we will begin anew. To search for dead bodies. To clear debris. To wring our hands. To bury our dead. And to rebuild. Likely in floodplains.