Galveston and the 1900 Storm

[Music] hello everybody from galveston texas i'm denise alexander and i'm the chief of museums and external relations for the galveston historical foundation and so i wanted to give you guys a little bit of an example of what i'm going to be talking about today so we were brainstorming on how to approach the 1900 storm's 120th anniversary and we thought that we would maybe do it a little bit differently instead of giving you all the examples and kind of going through the whole chronological order of how the storm came up from cuba and all that we thought that we would do just show you some photographs and so we partnered with our great friends at the rosenberg library at the texas history center and they were gracious enough to pull 15 images from their archives that i picked out and i'll tell you more about why i picked them out here in a few minutes and then supplemented with some photographs from ghfs on archives and some really nice donations that we've gotten throughout the years so that's what we're going to be doing today we've got some really great photos to show you so this photo is of the newspaper kind of telling you just a little bit about this was a september 13th the aftermath the headlines of the galveston daily news and so already by five days after of course the daily news was already um doing uh printing again and you can see how many they totaled the lives lost from four to five thousand we now know that's probably more in the 8 to 10 000 range a lot of folks were undocumented maybe not part of the census so i thought this was a very very striking image from the rosenberg library and which also became the title of a couple books that are out there so the great galveston disaster is also a name of the book which i think in the comments i've seen a couple of you already own so i wanted to tell you a little bit about galveston before the 1900 storm so this photograph is from ghf's collection from a book called the artwork of galveston that was published in 1894. so a lot of the photos that rosenberg library uses jhf uses is from this book and it is an absolutely phenomenal book it's a rare book and we're lucky enough to have some high-resolution scans of that book so galveston had about 37 thousand residents at the time of the 1900 storm and so those residents were primarily packed in between 45th street and 6th street between those areas and very very dense and i think the density is what we don't always see in galveston now these days we've got a lot of vacant lots different kinds of infill but i thought this photo showing looking northeast toward downtown you can kind of snake out in the top left there's clark and cork's building some various smoke stacks our train stations city hall and various other buildings in this photo but primarily i wanted to show you this because i wanted you to understand really the density that galveston had at the time of the 1900 storm so when we talk about the 1900 storm and the destruction that it left on the island this is a map showing the destruction uh line and so you can see at the top left it shows 45th street over to around 6th street which from if you're familiar with galveston is kind of in the utmb chile's arlen's area whataburger for the whataburger fans out there and you can see that it kind of comes through broadway is the middle street and then all the way over to 45th street and that's a if you're driving galveston that's a long way i mean we often say here now that it feels like you need to go and take a day's vacation if you need to go past 45th street and you live in the east end but that's kind of how the destruction line went and you can see that that shaded area everything was kind of pushed back to that line and specifically i want you to pay attention to the area that's around 14th and broadway and because i'm going to show you some pictures taken from bishop's palace in a few minutes and you can see how that destruction line came up right to broadway and what that looked like um i thought this photo was really cool from the rosenberg libraries archive because what i wanted to really get apart and let you guys know was that galveston is not as treed it was not as treed as it was back in the 1900s so a lot of debris how barren the landscape went and i specifically picked this picture out because not only did it show that windswept look but it shows bishop's palace in the background so this is looking from i would say around the avenue what i would consider the avenue o area kind of at the seawall looking all the way back toward bishop's palace which i think is a really cool picture showing bishop's palace and the ruins of the sacred heart church is also in this photo and you if you look closely you can see some folks walking around but i think these panoramic kind of photos are really really cool and interesting and it says a once prosperous section of beautiful homes near the beach i like how it says once prosperous section i think that's kind of funny um but this was from uh a book from new york city published by underwood and underwood and i think it's really fascinating to show how basically everything between the gulf and basically bishop's palace for you familiar with that area of town was destroyed um the next picture from the rosenberg library i love the clarity of these h h morris photos so i've picked out several of these to kind of illustrate the damage that happened in this residential area so again i'm the manager of bishop's palace of course i see it sitting in the background and i think that that's fascinating but you can see some folks just strolling along with umbrellas surveying damage you can see the two children in the foreground an abandoned truck the debris wagons moving folks some tents that had been set up and those tents were used to house residents kind of like a modern-day fema trailer but they were also used for work crews coming in for them to have a place to stay this next picture is a little bit is a little bit gruesome this actually is a gravestone or grave side picture showing um where they had built make makeshift graves along the beach area um which those of you who are very familiar with the night tender storm knows that that did not work out too well like we said there were anywhere between five to ten thousand bodies along this area the storm hit in the middle of the night people weren't all that did not expect it all that much of course they didn't have the same way of communication as we do now with cell phones and getting all that information out there was quite a bit different i think for young people sometimes they forget that we didn't have those methods of communication to get information across but this photo what i also like about it is that it um when sean sent me these from the rosenberg library he left the mats on so you can really see the condition of the photo as they were as they were given this to rosenberg so it's a pretty gruesome scene but it was one of the realities of what went on at that time is that they were looking for a place that became very hot like it does in galveston in september after the 1900 storm and so they were looking for ways to dispose of the bodies they went from bearing them on the beach to also having funeral pyres and some of those funeral pyres actually happened in the menard house lawn the chief of police ketchum lived in the menard house at the time the 1900 storm and some of those fires happened around there we've been told this photo i picked again because it was this really wonderful h h morris photo that's so abundantly clear showing uh just how a neighborhood would look days after the storm how houses were toppled on their sides how there's a wagon coming through maybe people retrieving some goods some folks out there even some people doing some laundry at the house on the left or hanging out closed to dry but also it kind of shows you how some houses were okay and then how your next door neighbor's house may have been toppled over and one of the things that i'm going to do as we get further along in this i was here at the time of hurricane ike and i'm going to show a couple of photos that were similar to some of the experiences in hurricane ike which is anniversary is coming up here in a few days but that also happened where the house that i was living on wall street did not get any water but everywhere around me got five and six feet of water so i thought this photo was very striking to show that some buildings were toppled knocked off to the grounds upside down turned over but then some of the neighbors houses were left unscathed this is a photograph that we were donated at ghf from the one of the gresham family descendants is a panoramic photo taken from the third floor of bishop's palace and so as those other photos at the beginning i was showing goes back from the beach looking toward bishop's palace this photograph is from the other way so you can really see how flat and just decimated that land is toward the gulf and often when i'm showing people around bishop's palace are on the third floor in mission gresham's painting studio you can really see the full expanse of the island from there and i think what a precarious place to build a house nicholas clayton actually wanted bishop's palace to be built along the beach where there were some other grand houses walter gresham declined that and chose for the house to be built at 14th and broadway namely because other hurricanes had hit galveston before the 1900 storm but i also want to show you the next photo which is a a um a collage photo you could say showing that those houses are still there that were in the photo from the 1900 storm and kind of how this would have looked today so i kind of think this is a cool way to think about how how it's grown up how those houses have been built back post 1900 storm how that lovely row of remaining houses is still in galveston and if you're driving by you can see those today and know that those four houses right when you come at 14th and broadway were storm survivors and that's pretty cool um this photo i love because this is from a collection of photographs ghf has it shows just people looking through wreckage looking for things i don't know what they're looking for but also show some really beautiful houses in the background and what it must have been like to been in one of those houses and to seeing this wall of debris come up and i think a lot of times when you're looking at photographs you can only imagine what people were doing what what it felt like and i just try to think about what it would have been like to been in one of those houses and to have woken up the next morning and to have seen this flat of debris out in front of you and worried about your neighbors and other families of friends worrying if they would survive pets animals all those kinds of things is really something to consider this photograph is again from h.h morris the collection from the rosenberg library and it's at 35th and r and if we know the addresses on the photographs i've tried to note those in the slides so that you can see them um but i think sometimes when people think about the 1900 storm they think that really that area around bishops palace the san jacinto neighborhoods all up to the gulf were some of the ones that really suffered but you can see that this destruction went all the way over to 35th street in the r area so if you're driving around you can kind of notice that you can see the one guys got an axe i don't know again like in the other photo i don't know what they're looking for but you can see the horse and carriage in the background um and see a house standing that this house was on brick piers as you can see in the photograph might be one of the reasons it was still there uh maybe a little bit sturdier than some of the other just plain wooden houses that galveston is known for but i also think about the removal of this debris when i see this photograph knowing what went on here after ike and the big gigantic crane buggies that would come along and remove the debris i think how did they get all this stuff out of here without cars without those big trucks and it was purely on manpower men like you see in this photograph came down to work and helped with clearing and getting the city back running so the last photo i believe of the residential area i'm going to show i felt like i had to show an upside down house photo this is 14th and avenue k this photo has been and other photos like it are used in a lot of different advertisements but i hadn't i hadn't really seen one from this angle before we call it the upside down house and you can see the house next door did across the street looks fine but you can see the roof line of a couple other photos and you can see the kind of the interesting map that this photograph is into which i think is really cool but the upside down house is very popular but i wanted to show it from a different angle so one of the things that makes a city and this is according to when the galveston city company was handing out the lots for the formation of galveston in 1838 they when they platted the city michelle menard and his associates as they were called they went through and decided the things that they needed to make a city were hospitals schools churches and city meeting facilities and places for city government to meet and so if you were an organization not like the city but like a school or a church community group they would give you free lots so that it would hopefully entice people to move to galveston to build a community here and so one of the buildings that i think is pretty is an awesome awesome building this was the galveston city hall and this is on 20th street between mechanic and market and i knew the building was somewhere right around here i asked jamie durham and our preservation resource library this morning jamie where is this where was this building at because it is no longer here and she goes if you were looking out your window in the henley building which is where i am that would be where this picture is so for those of you familiar with galveston there's a green area that is now becoming a parking garage between the anaco building and kind of the strand on this east end of the strand that's where the the galveston city hall was so this building was heavily destroyed the back side of it was taken off but it's very hard to put back a city after a hurricane when your city hall your places like this were heavily damaged and how would they go about organizing and binding together and communicating with each other is something i think about a lot and that's one of the reasons why i chose this photo and plus i just think that's an awesome building and i hate that it's not here this is the former ball high school at 21st and 22nd on ball street it's in the background with the dome i think that is just a remarkable building you can see the damage that it that it has and again one of the things that you need to get a community back up and running is you need you know schools many of the schools were heavily damaged after the 1900 storm the high school certainly was people's homes were too but you can see the debris line up to 21st and 22nd the ball high school building took up the entire block um which is which was just huge and beautiful but again one of the things that you need is schools and one of the things that was heavily damaged were all the schools here you can also see a cistern in the back of this house a lot of galveston houses had cisterns and as a way to get water bishops palace had one our neighbor's house had one they were pretty all over and if you drive around in the east end you can still catch a site of a cistern um and again talking about getting your city up and running you need water this was the galveston water works building at 30th and ball and 30th street again a smokestack you can see how heavily damaged it was another h.h morris photograph from the rosenberg library when you're when your water facilities are damaged like this your city hall is damaged your high school is damaged you've got a lot of work to do and that was one of the things that the men and some ladies helped spear in galveston was a pretty quick renewal and revival of galveston which i think is something that galveston is definitely known for is its resiliency after storms this photograph i put in because some of you history sleuths out there might be able to help us this is from the rosenberg library and it says it is an unidentified possibly african-american church many of the churches were heavily damaged you saw some photos of sacred heart church in the early photos i showed with bishop's palace in them st patrick's was heavily damaged um the cathedral and the basilica and catholic church was heavily damaged trinity was damaged our saint joseph's church was damaged um but i had not really ever paid attention to this photo of this possibly african-american church so if anybody happens to know where this is and they want to chime in we might be able to dig around and help identify where this this might be i did some quick comparisons with some churches i knew and it was nothing that was familiar to me but it shows that of course the storm struck all people it didn't matter your color you were you were damaged in the same way and i think that's one of the things that the city brought together folks of all different colors to rebuild after the storm when you know people's hearts were heavy especially when places that they love like their churches were damaged so another i love how this one says medical college badly damaged on the original photo from rosenberg library and this is old red i felt like another thing that that the uh well the thing that i knew was that the galveston city company had given some land for medical college and so here you go this is old red still in use today it's a little bit hidden by some modern buildings at utmb but you can see there were no other buildings around it like it is now that it was damaged another beautiful nicholas clayton building heavily damaged a lot of their specimens were damaged medical records were damaged much like even today when we have a storm those kinds of things were damaged but they didn't have a way to put things in the cloud like we do now and this was their main building of administration they had a surgical theater in there a library and everything was kind of kept intact but luckily that building is still there and if you're ever around utmb you can pop by and take a look at it this building i want to show a little bit about what happened to downtown since most of you are familiar with downtown this is the 2100 block of strand street these buildings are actually all still there you can visit them and go inside they're all stores and some residential upstairs but this was ritter's saloon it's a very popular photo that's been used a lot but you can see the buildings are still there but what happened is that a lot of them lost their top spaces so some of the buildings in downtown galveston maybe maybe two stories now but actually they were three and four stories we had a lot of buildings who lost their top floors in not only this hurricane but subsequent hurricanes and they shortened themselves out a little bit and so if you're ever looking down the strand take a look up at your surroundings and if you ever look up at a building and you think that building looks short or like it's unfinished or something happened to it that's probably because it did and so especially hurricane history fires of damaged buildings but you can see where the floors had collapsed and they're offloading all of that timber out onto strand street and again i thought about you know they don't have the trash truck with the claw to come along and take the debris away that all that had to be done with just basically sweat equity of individuals getting out but i'm also going to say a testament to galveston that these buildings with these beautiful cast iron fronts were left there and so we can still visit them today um i chose this photo because this i had a kind of a flashback to hurricane i so even though your your the storm is gone you're still left with all these things of standing water this is the 2100 block of post office and again another one of these morris photos i think they're just so incredibly clear and you can zoom in on a really good scan you can see where there's still hats hanging in the windows but you can see where the infrastructure was torn down there's light poles off in the street there's still some wagons around i just think that these photos really show what an aftermath of a hurricane looks like to a city even though your buildings still may be standing your interior floors often were definitely not you had to clean them all out start piling debris up which is something that any survivor of a hurricane has had to deal with and so what that photo did was remind me of this photograph that i took after hurricane ike on mechanic street which i think are a little they're eerily similar to me they're still showing wet ground i've not it's not drained trolley tracks are similar and then people just putting their things out they were wet out on the curb which is what happened in both of these storms so this is across the street from the tremont house at the former mardi gras museum mid-summer books and some of these places that were in galveston back in 08. this photograph is a ghf photo and it shows the a little bit closer more close photo closer up photo of the grand opera house this block of post office street which i know folks you're watching are probably very familiar with um some of our favorite bar haunts are along the street and again showing this destruction of of the 1894 grand opera house and then i took this photo walking back to the office one day our office at that time was at the custom house and so again it just to me they seemed very similar the grain was doing some work on the facade of the building at the time of hurricane ike but you can see that both of those buildings are still still in the same same space still trucking still living today and just shows you how even though hurricanes and things like that keep coming and going that these resilient buildings are always we get we were thankfully left with them and so this photo i picked just because i thought it was just really interesting it was close up showing some faces and glamping right now is really popular i see people out going out camping and seeing these fancy tents put up in other places and i was like boy this sure was not glamping these are i don't know if these were folks who were taking shelter there or they were working but they had set this up as their little makeshift home kind of area um which i think is really interesting that of course we had to do you're out of places to live you don't have a hotel situation like we do now and so you had to have some places for you to go to see seek some kind of shelter away from the sun which was something that in galveston was very much i think they had some really crazy high hot weather after the 1900 storm and so um you need some place to get out of it i just love this picture it looks like they've been kind of surprised or like you're taking a picture of me i'm so hot i'm so tired i'm sitting here in this tent on the beach but i think that's a really really beautiful photograph and so the last photo from our from our presentation is going to be here on kind of as a teaser on a potential program that we might do so if it's something that you want us to do let us know and that is the the grade raising so um after the 1900 storm as many of you are familiar with galveston was left with a decision to make did it want this water to come in and tear its housing kill its people again or didn't want to make a decision and try to find a way to stop it and so from that a group of folks got together and they engineered a sea wall to be built and so that's a completely different presentation if it's something that you would like to see we've got some really beautiful photographs showing that grade raising and we can talk about that but um in the con the conclusion of how having a storm and what a city does and how it rebuilds i think galveston's efforts were amazing that they ended up taking on something like this sea wall that they just didn't pack up and move away that they decided to stay in galveston live here make it their home and figure out a way to make that happen so this house on the left is waiting its fill and so you can see here where the pumps in the dredge water had already filled the house some of the houses over there on the right and then to the left that fill would go in around this house and put it back on even even land again so they raised the island 17 feet at the tip top of the seawall and it slopes down toward the bay we end up about at grade about at grade where we were at grade raising about broadway street but i think that's super interesting on how galveston chose to survive was to come up with this plan to rebuild and again i think that's something that galveston is really good at so with that being said we just wanted to give you guys an example of what um some wonderful photographs a kind of a trip down memory lane on how this would all look and we thank you for tuning in with us today and we'd like to thank our partners at the rosenberg library and sean mcconnell who graciously helped provide these photos for us we're all a little short staffed these days and it was nice to be able to show the photographs and the wonderful collection and archive that the rosenberg library has for research they're wonderful to work with and it was very nice of them to be able to let us use these photos and we hope that you've enjoyed seeing a little trip down memory lane maybe some photographs you haven't seen before something a little bit different than just your normal storm um storm talk there's a lot of really wonderful books out there on the grade raising in the 1900 storm and for all those detail-oriented people you can go back and check through those but we thought looking through some of these photographs might be interesting to some of you as well [Music] you

Channel: Galveston Historical Foundation

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Id: ssE7THRZcr0

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022