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Portland bay
view
Photo courtesy Ken
Rudine, May 2007 |
History in
a Seashell
John
G. Willacy, purchased 1,920 acres of land from the Coleman-Fulton
Pasture Company in 1891. Willacy had formed an investment company
by uniting the New England Land Company of Portland, Maine and the
Portland Harbor and Improvement Company of Wichita, Kansas.
A post office was granted in March of 1891and lots went on sale that
July. Potential buyers were brought across the bay by a chartered
boat to a hotel built especially for the occasion. Others arrived
by train from San Antonio.
By the following year the population had reached 500 and a 1,200-foot
wharf was built.
Boom times disappeared with the panic of 1893 and the now vacant hotel
was converted into Bay View College
- an institution that operated until it was destroyed in a 1916 hurricane.
Since Portland had no water supply of its own, water was piped in
from a well in Taft.
In 1911 Willacy tried again by negotiating with the Coleman-Fulton
Pasture Company for the land that it had repossessed.
Competetion from the Rio Grande Valley (for agriculture) and the hurricanes
of 1916 and 1919 dashed Portland's dreams of becoming a port.
Portland's growth since then has been from an overflow from Corpus
Christi. The city limits of Portland now extend into Nueces
County. |
Historical Marker:
FM 893, 0.1 mile N of FM 1074, W of Portland.
Site
of
White Point Mass Graves of 1919 Hurricane Victims
On Saturday, September
13, 1919, the last swarms of vacationers who packed the Corpus
Christi beaches were warned that a massive hurricane, which had
gathered strength in the Gulf for two weeks, was approaching the shore.
Most ignored the warnings in favor of the last weekend of the summer
season.
By Sunday afternoon the buildings on North Beach, battered by winds
up to 110 miles per hour and storm tides up to 16 feet, began to break
up. By Monday morning, bodies and debris had begun to wash up on the
shore at White Point. Black
oil from the storage tanks near Port
Aransas covered everything. Over the next few days, more than
200 people worked to rescue survivors and retrieve the dead. Bodies
were taken to the West Portland schoolhouse on this site. Identifying
the remains proved difficult; the bodies were broken, covered in oil,
and in some cases whole families had perished, leaving no one to identify
them. The remains were weighed on a cotton scale and taken almost
a mile back toward the beach where they were found. They were laid
to rest in a mass grave dug with a slip scraper.
More than 30 separate graves were dug from Indian Point near Portland
to a spot about 20 miles up Nueces Bay. Some of the larger
graves measured 1400 feet wide and 3200 feet long. Evidence indicates
that all the bodies were moved to Rose Hill Cemetery in Corpus
Christi and to other sites about a month later. The official death
toll was 284; estimates place the actual number, including those lost
at sea, at about 1,000. Property damage from the 1919 storm was estimated
at about 20 million dollars. This gravesite and the others serve as
a reminder of the power of the elements. (2000) |
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Bay View College
historical marker
Photo courtesy Ken
Rudine, May 2007 |
Historical Marker:
154 Elm Street and 1st Avenue, Violet Andrews Park
Bay View College
An important school
of the coastal region, founded for scattered South Texas ranch children,
by Thomas M. (1856-1943) and Alice Yantis Clark (1857-1913), of the
family that founded Texas Christian University. The Clarks utilized
2-story "Hotel Portland", opened 1891 but soon idled by national business
recession. With Mrs. Mollie Allen Turner as associate, they opened
Bay View College in Sept. 1894, teaching primary through junior college
subjects. Mrs. Clark, who also managed "The Home" for boarders, taught
painting; Clark, music and literary subjects. Recreation included
riding (on student-owned horses), house parties at patron George Fulton's
Rincon Ranch (12 miles northeast), and an annual San Jacinto Day sail
on Corpus Christi Bay. The first Bachelor of Letters degrees were
awarded to a class of three: Wallace Clark, Lucille Long, Ed Rachal.
In time, a 2-story boys' dormitory, a gymnasium, and a 2-story chapel
stood on campus. Students came from 70 Texas counties, 12 other states,
and Mexico. Some Bay View graduates went on to senior colleges and
entered professions, many remained in ranching.
In 1916 , a hurricane destroyed most of the buildings. A day school
session was held the next winter in the chapel, but the college formally
closed in 1917. (1973) |
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Violet Andrews
Park
Photo courtesy Ken
Rudine, May 2007 |
Portland city
limit sign
Photo courtesy Ken
Rudine, May 2007 |
| Texas
Escapes, in its purpose to preserve historic, endangered and vanishing
Texas, asks that anyone wishing to share their local history, stories,
landmarks and recent or vintage photos, please contact
us. |
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