Yet a fleck of truth still lingers in what Alexander E. Sweet and J. Armoy Knox wrote of Houston in 1883: “After you have listened to the talk of one of these pioneer veterans for some time, you begin to feel that the creation of the world, the arrangement of the solar system, and all subsequent events, including the discovery of America, were provisions of an all-wise Providence, arranged with a direct view to the advancement of the commercial interests of Houston.”
A bayou baptism, late in the 1890s, at the foot of what is now White Street. The photograph is one of many made by Frank R. Hutton, Sr., a gifted amateur photographer, who came to Houston in 1893.
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Fifty miles inland, Houston is one of the nation’s principal world ports. Being rich in oil and natural gas, it has come to dominate two mammoth industries, petrochemicals and the sending of natural gas to the nation. For half a century beginning in the early 1900s, Houston belonged to oil. For the next half-century, it may belong to space.
Oil and its big quick profits—little is said of its big quick losses—and the extravagant legends about oil riches did more than anything except the Houston Ship Channel to give Houston its One Million. The city got a foretaste of its oil destiny thirty-five years before the Spindletop gusher roared in when Richard W. Dowling, the Confederate hero of the Battle of Sabine Pass, and John M. Fennerty formed a company in 1866 for “Mechanical operations in mining and boring for oil....” Their project was ridiculed, and its outcome is unknown.
The historian Andrew Forest Muir has shown that two critical periods in the growth of Houston were the half-decade from 1857 to 1861, when it became the rail center of Texas, and the decade beginning with the Spindletop gusher in 1901. Two others are the decade after the Houston Ship Channel was opened late in 1914—a period further stimulated by World War I—and the fifteen years beginning just before World War II. The inception of the federal space laboratory begins a fifth cycle of growth.
The Houston Post Office, completed in 1890, at the southeast corner of Franklin Avenue and Fannin Street.