Pod Insights American History Tellers The 1900 Galveston Hurricane | After the Storm | 4 About this episode The devastation of the 1900 Galveston hurricane left thousands dead and a city in ruins — but it also set in motion a remarkable story of recovery and reinvention. As survivors buried their dead and relief poured in, city leaders adopted an entirely new form of government to steer the rebuilding effort.
In this episode, Lindsay is joined by historian Dr. Patricia Bixel, who shares how Galveston rose from the wreckage — constructing a massive seawall and raising the city's own grade to face whatever the Gulf might bring next. Bixel is the co-author, with Elizabeth Hayes Turner, of Galveston and the 1900 Storm: Catastrophe and Catalyst.
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0:15 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers: Our History, Your Story.
0:36 Lindsay Graham? On September 8, 1900, a ferocious hurricane leveled the island city of Galveston. In the aftermath, what had been the primary port in the western Gulf of Mexico looked like a war zone. Railroad and streetcar tracks destroyed, churches demolished, there were miles of wreckage, and the remains of human and animal corpses lay strewn all across the island. Between 6,000 to 8,000 people died in total. Nearly two-thirds of the city's properties were destroyed, telegraph, power, and electrical lines were down, and the bridges were gone. This hurricane remains one of the worst natural disasters in American history, an absolute catastrophe, but also a catalyst for resurrection and
1:18 Lindsay Graham? reform, according to today's guest, Dr. Patricia Bixel. She's a retired history professor from the Maine Maritime Academy. Bixel co-authored Galveston and the 1900 Storm: Catastrophe and Catalyst with Elizabeth Hayes Turner. Our conversation is next.
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2:43 Lindsay Graham? Dr. Patricia Bixel, thanks so much for joining us on American History Tellers.
2:46 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me.
2:48 Lindsay Graham? So let's start with Galveston before the storm. At the turn of the century in 1900, the port had a population of about 38,000. It had a good natural harbor. Wharves moved cotton, food, and raw materials. It was a busy place. And you write that Galveston was vibrant and cosmopolitan. If we were to walk around the streets of the city during the first week of September 1900, what might we have seen?
3:13 Speaker 04 Well, you would have seen a very, very active port. Galveston is, of course, based on Galveston Island, which is a barrier island that parallels the Texas coast. It was the only natural harbor in the state at the time. So it was the major port of the area. At one point, something like 80% to 90% of anything coming into Texas came through Galveston. And you probably would either be hearing about or looking forward to the Labor Day Parade, which was a huge event in Galveston at the time. Because of the economic importance of the port and all of the unions and all the men that worked in the port operations, there was always a massive Labor Day Parade. Because of the port, you had the infrastructure, the financial infrastructure that goes with that. So you had banking and insurance. So it was a very wealthy community.
3:58 Speaker 04 The city itself was a mixture of very large prominent stone and brick business buildings with large housing areas that reached toward the beach with the port on the sort of mainland side of the island and then the beach and those houses and those neighborhoods that stretched away from the port toward the beach. Galveston had a summer population that came for the beautiful weather and the beaches. It was also a port city and port cities are different. Port cities, because people and goods and ships are coming and going all the time, tend to be very diverse. Galveston had a significant ethnic and racial diverse population and you had the culture that went with the money that was there.
4:41 Speaker 04 So you had operas and symphonies and music and dance halls and bars and brothels and all the things that come with being a port city. So Galveston at the time was the major and most developed city in Texas.
4:55 Lindsay Graham? But it was vulnerable to flooding and the people of Galveston knew that. Many built their houses on pilings. They still do.
5:01 Speaker 04 Yes, that's very true.
5:02 Lindsay Graham? I travel to Galveston almost every year on vacation. But did Galveston's leaders ever consider protecting the city in some way?
5:10 Speaker 04 They did. Occasionally, people would bring to the city council the idea of some level of protection for the island, but by and large, it was just seen to be too expensive. For decades before the storm, there was always discussion about how to adapt the flooding. Salt cedars were planted along the dunes and along the beach to try and help with that. There occasionally were discussions about looking to the state for some funding for a seawall or some sort of barricade. But this is a tricky thing because to do that, to say we need to protect the island, acknowledge the level of risk that was there. And if you acknowledge a level of risk, you also risk investors and development and economic growth.
5:51 Speaker 04 And so to say that the island was in this dangerous situation was seen as an economic killer. And so people whispered about it, but there was not a really serious discussion about major efforts to protect the island from a hurricane.
6:08 Lindsay Graham? So of course, without any protection from a hurricane, it was inevitable that one would come and it sure did. The consequences were devastating. From your research, once people realized that this was no ordinary storm, what are some of the ways they tried to ride it out?
6:24 Speaker 04 Well, unfortunately, that didn't happen until the storm was well underway in a lot of cases. People would try and go to their neighbors' homes up on higher pilings. They would go down to the business district where the buildings were also more substantial and built of brick and stone. At that point, there was really no way off the island. So you would go up to the upper floors of your house. In some situations, people used axes to cut holes in their floors and open doors so that the water would come up and perhaps anchor the house rather than sweep it off its pilings. So to the extent that it was possible, people tried to get to higher ground or more substantial buildings. About the middle of the late evening, I want to say, I believe it was around eight or nine
7:07 Speaker 04 o'clock, there was all of a sudden this rush of water. And looking back on it, we know that that was probably the storm surge. And the storm surge was about 15 feet. And not only did you have the actual water that was coming from the Gulf of Mexico, you had all of the debris and all of the lumber and the stuff from the houses that had been destroyed that was being pushed by this water. And that in itself caused a lot of destruction. The other thing about Galveston and its location is you not only have the Gulf on one side, but you've got Galveston Bay on the other side. So you had water that sort of met in the middle of the island that was coming both from the Gulf side, from the Gulf of Mexico, and from Galveston Bay. But like I say, we know that this probably happened in mid to late evening that night,
7:52 Speaker 04 and then the waters began to recede.
7:55 Lindsay Graham? Now, this disaster was late enough so that there is photo documentation of the devastation, and your book includes some of these. When you look at the photos, what would we see?
8:07 Speaker 04 You see swept landscapes. We were very fortunate in that when we did the book, we've got access to photographic sources that hadn't been used before. So there's materials from the National Archives and from the University of Texas and some other holdings around the country that people hadn't seen before. But the ones that strike me are the ones that just show all of this lumber and all of these materials stacked up, and then you just see sky. You see all of this wreckage, sometimes with bodies, sometimes with items and articles that you can recognize. But mostly, it's just lumber and, you know, a destroyed town that's just lying there on the beach. The photo that both Liz and I liked the most is the cover photo of the book, which we found in the National Archives.
8:49 Speaker 04 And it's a woman who's standing there at the end of this tunnel of debris. There is immense amounts of debris on either side of her, and there are a group of children at the end of this walkway. And she's carrying what looks like laundry or a bundle of something, and she's walking down this tunnel of debris toward these children. And there are a couple of structures in the background, so you can tell there is some level of built environment around. But to us, this was like the perfect storm photo. This basically conveyed what we wanted to about this book and what the book was going to talk about.
9:25 Lindsay Graham? Well, one of the issues of the cleanup after the storm is the task of handling the corpses. What was the effort of clearing like?
9:34 Speaker 04 This is probably one of the most awful and horrific aspects of the cleanup, because there were tremendous number of deaths. The death toll that has been settled on over the years is about 6,000. A lot of those were on the island. Bodies were collected within all of this debris and all of these areas. Initially, they decided they were going to try and take them out to sea, basically do burials at sea. And so they would load the bodies on barges, wait them, and take them out. But unfortunately, they came back on the tide. They came back up onto the island on the tide. So that wasn't going to work. The other thing that I think it's good to note is that people realized immediately the sanitation issues were terribly threatening to the health of the population. So you had to do something about it. And the decision was made that, in fact,
10:19 Speaker 04 they were going to burn the bodies. So they started these immense funeral pyres on the beach. And this had the, I don't want to say double advantage, I guess, of being a reasonable way to dispose of the corpses so that they couldn't make anyone sick. And you burned a lot of the debris that way. And so, for at least a month after the storm, funeral pyres were burning on the beaches. The smell was horrific. The work of gathering the corpses and taking them to the pyres was horrific. As recovery goes on, of course, you're discovering bodies for months. And eventually morgues were set up in some of the larger warehouses and brick buildings that were more in the business district and down on the street.
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12:41 Lindsay Graham? So in the wake of this devastation, all the bodies, debris, just wrecked lives and businesses everywhere, how did Galveston organize its disaster response? There was no federal agency, so what did recovery look like in the first days after the hurricane?
12:57 Speaker 04 The businessmen and most of the leadership of the city survived. They formed the Central Relief Committee was the name of it, the CRC. And they immediately, you know, assigned every person to a committee and there was a public health and there was a transportation and there was power and there was getting the services back, getting the water mains going. And they did that immediately. The bridge to the mainland, because Galveston is an island, the bridge to the mainland had been destroyed. So initially, two of the CRC members got on a boat and went to the mainland and picked up a railcar, one of the kinds that you pumped, and got to Houston and told people about the storm. And at that point, ships, boats began to come to the island. They evacuated a lot of women and children.
13:40 Speaker 04 No able-bodied men were allowed to leave because they needed help with the cleanup. Eventually, martial law is declared to provide for safety of the people remaining on the island. And they put out a call to Clara Barton and the Red Cross. There is no FEMA, as we are used to seeing and hearing about with disasters now. So it was a completely private relief effort. And the people of Houston were very helpful, the people in the region were helpful, but the bulk of the effort and the help came from the Red Cross.
14:07 Lindsay Graham? I'm glad you mentioned Clara Barton and the Red Cross. She was head of the Red Cross and went to Galveston to organize relief. Tell us about her efforts, because she ended up being kind of a mix between a booster and then also a reporter of the facts on the ground.
14:21 Speaker 04 Clara Barton and the Red Cross were central and absolutely essential to the recovery of Galveston for a number of different reasons. It's the last disaster that she attends in person. She has a special train that is put together for her to come to Galveston. And once she's there, she is really moved by what she's seeing and what the situation is on the island. And she writes back to one of her correspondents, "The churches, the great business houses, the elegant residences of the cultured and opulent, the modest little homes of laborers of a city of nearly 40,000 people, the center of foreign shipping and railroad traffic lay in splinters." Her reports went national. Later on, she writes, "The
15:04 Speaker 04 conditions in Galveston had not been exaggerated. Devastation is terrible," she wrote. "Millions of aid needed. The need here is tenfold greater than has yet to be reported." Clara Barton, with her connections to the Red Cross, had an entire network of groups and agencies across the country. And because of her credibility, because people knew Clara Barton did legitimate disaster relief, and there was no scam, no fraud, this was the real deal. They believed her when she said Galveston and its population needed help. And so, when she put the call out for aid, it came. It came from all over the country, anywhere from 25 cents to $1,000, and was enormously important.
15:47 Speaker 04 Secondly, Clara Barton knew what was required for relief. She knew, not only did you need food and shelter for people in the immediate aftermath, you needed to plan for the winter that was coming. You needed to plan for the schools reopening. You needed sheets and pillowcases and medicines. And she even worked with, through the Central Relief Committee. She becomes a member of the Central Relief Committee and worked with the union labor there in Galveston to create housing for the upcoming winter. And you can still see these houses in Galveston. They were called commissary houses, because you got them from the Red Cross. They were very simple and relatively small, but she managed to see that enough of these were built to help with sheltering the storm survivors for that coming winter.
16:32 Speaker 04 The island received tents from the Army. There was the White Tent City on the beach. The other very important thing that Clara Barton does, she's got her network of support that she gives. She knows what is needed for this recovery. But she also, for the women of Galveston, modeled a woman in power and a woman with access to power. With the Central Relief Committee, there was every ward in the city. The city was organized into wards. Every ward had a male sort of head of relief for that particular ward. But Clara Barton saw that there was a woman who was also appointed, that was the sort of boots on the ground in the individual wards that distributed relief. And this is going to be very important as the island recovers. She models for them a woman. A way in which women can participate in civic life.
17:16 Speaker 04 And they do this by forming a chapter of the Women's Health Protective Association. And this was a group that had a national network. There were WHPAs all over the country. And so Galveston Women formed this. And the first thing they do, of course, is help with the storm recovery. They become responsible, in many ways, for reburialing the dead. They become responsible, after the building of the seawall and the gray raising, for revegetating the island. They take on issues of sanitation. They get sanitation improved in dairies and butcher shops and areas like that. Of course, the only way they can do this is by lobbying their male relatives, their husbands, their brothers, their uncles, and getting those men who can vote and who are
18:00 Speaker 04 involved in politics on the island to see it their way. But what eventually happens, of course, is that a lot of these women get involved in the suffragist movement. Some of them become leaders in the Texas state suffragist movement. And so there's a really direct line between storm recovery and the evolution of women and women's roles in cities and governments.
18:22 Lindsay Graham? You mentioned that Clara Barton had a reputation which engendered trust in her assessment of the disaster. That got me thinking about the press coverage of this disaster at the time. It remains the largest natural disaster in American history. So how was it received throughout the country?
18:39 Speaker 04 Well, there's a couple of different ways. One, a lot of the coverage of the storm was sensationalized. There were terrible stories told about looting and vandalism and the robbing of bodies and that sort of thing. There is a whole genre of literature that comes out about the storm. The local coverage by the press is more realistic and more authentic about exactly what was going on, as you might imagine. Clarence Owlsley, who is one of the leaders in Galveston, eventually publishes an antidote to all the sensationalized press in order to raise money to reopen the schools. And this, at the time, becomes the best of the accounts out there. It takes a while for people to get there. I mean, it takes a while for people to actually get on the island.
19:22 Speaker 04 You have Clara Barton writing letters and describing what she's seeing. But it takes a while for the rest of the country's press to get a grasp on exactly what's been happening.
19:33 Lindsay Graham? So let's stay on the ground here during the relief effort. Clara Barton and the Red Cross are operating as fast as they can. How are they distributing relief to survivors of the hurricane?
19:44 Speaker 04 So they eventually developed warehouses down in the Strand District, in the business district, and the warehouses would distribute goods and food and other necessary items to the individual wards. And then in the wards, the daily distribution would happen for people that came seeking goods and seeking food and things that they needed for their households.
20:04 Lindsay Graham? And what about the challenges faced day to day by the survivors who remained on the island? How did they go about rebuilding?
20:11 Speaker 04 Immediately, of course, it was finding food. It was finding people, their own friends and family that they were looking for. Of course, it was finding housing. You could go to the Red Cross and you could apply for a commissary house. You could see if they would build you a small house. Otherwise, they rebuilt as they could. You had what were called storm houses, which people took the lumber that had been from the destroyed houses and they rebuilt sheds and shacks and houses for themselves on a temporary basis. Eventually, the water system gets put back online and you can get fresh water. And the other thing coming onto the island at this time period was a whole bunch of building materials. And so new houses were constructed. Houses where they could be were repaired.
20:55 Speaker 04 There was an orphanage that was set up for children that were found whose parents had been killed. And the merchants got their businesses back up and going. I guess one of the, if you can say, there was a good thing about this. The major mercantile area of the island, the downtown and where the grocery stores were and the merchants were, was left relatively intact. I mean, it was flooded, but the buildings remained. They had not been destroyed. This was the Strand area, which is near the port. And so as the wharves are rebuilt, then you can get in the materials that you need. You can get food coming in. You can develop at least a semblance of what was a normal life.
21:35 Lindsay Graham? So Galveston is famously known, other than the hurricane, as, I guess, the birthplace of Juneteenth. It was the last place where the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered. And so it is a city known for its race relations. How did racial divides appear in the relief and rebuilding efforts?
21:55 Speaker 04 Unfortunately, the race relations in Galveston probably got worse after the storm. The city beforehand had a very strong and very vibrant black community with a strong black middle class. There was a newspaper, there were schools, there were libraries, there was a professional class. And during the storm, everybody took care of everybody. Blacks and whites stayed and took refuge in the same places. They took care of each other. They saved each other. There's a black gentleman that swims out and recovers and saves people out in the Gulf. And so during the storm itself, race is not a particular factor. After the storm, it does become somewhat problematic in that black community does not
22:38 Speaker 04 receive the level of help from the relief efforts that the white community did. The black Galvestonians were allowed to come to the wards in the afternoons, at which point they were given access to what was left. The black community protests this. And interestingly enough, Clara Barton, also in her history as working with the Red Cross, there was also a very strong network of Black Red Cross units and Black Red Cross agencies and groups around the country. And those groups sent relief directly to Black Galvestonians. And they wanted to make sure that their donations went to the black community, and the Red Cross facilitated that. Clara Barton was very concerned about the even and equal
23:20 Speaker 04 distribution of relief goods. And so to her utmost, she did the best she could to see that there was equity in this. Of course, we're talking about a southern city. And so that time and place was not as perhaps just and equal as it should have been. The interesting thing about Galveston, though, given the city that it had been, the black community developed their own parallel system of relief, in many cases, for their own communities. They protested what they saw as unequal treatment by the overall relief efforts on the island. But they also developed their own network of support for each other and reached out to the national black organizations that facilitated relief going to that community in Galveston.
24:02 Lindsay Graham? Well, let's explore the national relief efforts. With no federal agency to coordinate it, it's really up to individuals. And oftentimes, major US cities rose up to the occasion and held fundraisers to help Galvestonians. Maybe you could share with us what New York City did to help.
24:19 Speaker 04 Because of Galveston's position as a port, because of the connections, the economic and financial connections it had with the rest of the country, people knew about Galveston. They were invested in Galveston. They had relatives in Galveston. They'd visited Galveston. There was a major relief event that occurred in New York City. William Randolph Hearst organized a fundraiser bazaar and wealthy people donated items for sale. There were silver and watches and jewels and fur coats. Mark Twain did an evening of entertainment. Queen Victoria sent a document of support and over $50,000 was raised specifically to repair the Galveston Orphans Home, which was finally rededicated in 1902.
25:00 Speaker 04 But yeah, the New York population stepped up with its connections to Galveston and provided a very public and very helpful contribution to rebuilding the island.
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26:53 Lindsay Graham? So in your book, you wrote about the devastation, but also the fact that the hurricane was an important catalyst for change in Galveston. So how did the city government reform in the wake of the crisis? Certainly, they rethought their decision not to build a seawall. But what exactly did they do and how did they help?
27:10 Speaker 04 Well, it's interesting. After the storm, there is a general consensus that, obviously, they need to rebuild. Galveston's not going anywhere. The port's still there. This is a time technologically before you have a significant number of ports around the Gulf of Mexico. The technology doesn't exist to dredge deep channels up to Houston or Corpus Christi or a lot of the places that will eventually have significant ports. So Galveston is still, from a port perspective, the only game in town. And so the city knows that it needs to rebuild and reconstruct itself. Politically, the city had not been particularly well-run, and they have defaulted on some bonds. They know that it's going to be very, very difficult to get the funding they need to rebuild the island and the city until they get their sort of political house in order.
27:55 Speaker 04 In Galveston, there's another group of people that's very important called the Deep Water Committee. And this was a group of very wealthy men, whose primary focus was the development and maintenance of the port. And they obviously understand that Galveston is going to need a lot of funding in order to reconstruct and rebuild. They work with members of the Central Relief Committee and look at what the government is going to be afterwards. And they decide that perhaps, in order to be effective, in order to have the confidence of investors, in order to get the money they need to do this rebuilding, they are going to change the form of government for the city. They're going to become one of the first cities in the country to have a commissioned form of government.
28:38 Speaker 04 And this is not a mayor and alderman or a mayor and council type format. This is a group of people that are chosen. And this becomes a bone of contention going forward. But they're picked to handle a particular division of the operation, the city's operation. So somebody will do finances, somebody will do power, somebody will do water, somebody will take care of, you know, building permits and things like that. But it's divided based on function. And initially, the request is that the state appoint the commissioners to this new commission form of government. Well, what you might notice here is there's a lack of democracy, that nobody's electing this commission it's being appointed. And so that becomes an issue.
29:21 Speaker 04 And eventually, it is decided that the governor will appoint a certain number of the commissioners, and some of them will be elected at large. But this is the form of government that the city decides will need to be in place. One of the interesting things about this, other than it's a completely different form of government, is some of the people that agree to get involved. It's members of the Deepwater Committee. Some of the wealthier people on the island agree to become part of this commission. They get the city's financial hassle and order, and they create an infrastructure for recovery that people trust. It's interesting to think about whether this would have occurred if it weren't during the progressive period. This is the progressive period in American history where there is efforts at reform,
30:05 Speaker 04 new efforts at new kinds of structures of government. And Galveston becomes one of the first cities in the country to have a commission form of government. Eventually, there are going to be hundreds of small and larger city governments that are based on this model. People come to Galveston to look at their commission form of government to see if it works. So this is the first thing that happens, is that you develop this new governmental structure, and then the rest of the recovery of the island sort of flows out of that.
30:33 Lindsay Graham? Let's turn to the preventative measures that were embarked upon. Galveston did decide to build a seawall. What was the process of making that decision, designing it, and then constructing it?
30:44 Speaker 04 Well, the city commission hired some engineers, General H.M. Robert, who's also interesting because he is the author of Robert's Rules of Order, which is a small book that governs the way meetings are run all over the world. And Alfred Noble and H.C. Ripley, who had all been either Corps of Engineers engineers or had worked in Galveston on engineering projects, they were very familiar with the island, they were very familiar with the topography and the wave action and all of the natural dynamics of the space. The commission hired them to think about, you know, what you could do to protect the island and report back. So they submit a report to the city in 1902, and it's got three parts. First one is the seawall.
31:27 Speaker 04 What this initial report suggests is a three-mile-long seawall of solid concrete, 17 feet high, or 17 feet above mean-low water. That would have put it 1.3 feet higher than the storm surge that had come with the storm. At the bottom, the wall would be 16 feet wide, at the top, 5 feet. The city commission did issue bonds to do that, and I would note that they were absolutely religious about paying these bonds. So the bonds were issued and they were paid off on time and exactly the way they were supposed to have been. In addition to the seawall, they also specified that the grade of the island should be raised. If you had gone to Galveston before the storm, you could pretty much, if you know Galveston, you could stand at 25th and Broadway and you could see the beach on one side and the
32:12 Speaker 04 port on the other. And the mean height of the island at the time was about 9 feet. So one of the things they say is if you're going to build the seawall, you need to fill in and raise the land behind it. So part of the report also recommends a grade raising, the raising of the island. And to fill in then between the wall and the land so that the storm surge will be deflected and you would not have the kind of damage that they had had with the 1900 storm.
32:41 Lindsay Graham? I'm looking at a picture of the seawall as it was constructed and it's not inconsequential. It's a, it looks like a little mini Hoover Dam.
32:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was built in alternating sections and they had these massive forms that they would put up and they would fill with concrete and then they went back and fill in with the next section. And people were aware of seawalls, other places had seawalls. So this is not something that's terribly unusual. This initial seawall was three miles long. I think now the seawall is at least 10 and maybe more. And it goes significant distance down the island. It's a place where people walk and run and there's a road that goes alongside of it that moves you pretty much the entire length of the island. So it's been very much integrated into the geography of the island.
33:28 Lindsay Graham? So the raising of the city's grade, because I know Galveston and I've never really thought that I was walking on the seawall. I see one precipice to my left or right, but the city just extends at 17 feet high.
33:41 Speaker 04 Yes.
33:41 Lindsay Graham? That's a lot of fill. How did they accomplish it?
33:44 Speaker 04 It was very interesting. The grade raising, there, there really hasn't been a grade raising done like this anywhere in the country. The other cities have done it in small areas and small sections, but just in summary, I will say before explaining how they did it, about 500 blocks were filled. It took 16.3 million cubic yards of fill. And the way that they did it, the company that they hired was a firm called Get Hart and Bates. Get Hart and Bates commissioned dredges from Holland, from the Dutch, and they came across the Atlantic Ocean to Galveston. They dug a canal through the island from the east end reasonably far into the island that the dredges would be able to traverse,
34:28 Speaker 04 the dredges could go into. So the way it would work is a dredge would go out into the Gulf of Mexico and it would pick up a dredge load of mud. And it would go into this canal and then it would take the mud and it would pump it. Underneath houses. The city took responsibility for raising the roads and the gas lines and the power lines, the sewers, any kind of city service that was underground, the city committed to raise. People had to raise their own houses. If they were already on stilts, depending on the height of the stilt, you might get away with it. You might not have to do anything to your house. Some people who had brick houses, who had pretty extensive properties, filled in the first floor or filled in the basements and then built a third or fourth story on top. You had to raise your chicken house.
35:13 Speaker 04 If you had a garage or any stable or any outbuildings, you had to raise those. But by and large, people went along with it. Some of the most impressive cases of the grade raising involved St. Patrick's Catholic Church and the Letitia Rosenberg Women's Home. And the way that would work is you dug down under the building and you put in these joists with jacks. And we're talking with these two particular buildings, probably 50 to 100 joists and then well over 100 to 200 jacks. And then you very, very, very carefully raise the jacks, which raise the joists, which raise the building, and then you could pump in under it this new foundation. It was truly impressive.
35:56 Speaker 04 It takes them until 1911 to finish this. And I believe that the parts that were raised were raised anywhere from two to nine feet.
36:04 Lindsay Graham? Now, I am suspicious that it was 100% mud that was used. Surely some other items got thrown in.
36:11 Speaker 04 Well, yes. A lot of housewives took the opportunity, women, probably men too, but they took the opportunity to get rid of objects they didn't really like. And we found some very funny pictures along the way of, next to the canal are pictures of where people put in chairs or they put in pieces of furniture or they put in things that maybe they didn't like. One lady wrote in her diary that many women got rid of white elephants this way.
36:33 Lindsay Graham? So September 1901 rolls around, the first anniversary of this disaster. What was the city of Galveston like?
36:40 Speaker 04 Personally, I think they were probably still a little shell shocked because this is before they've decided to build the seawall. This is before they've gotten the government change. This is before the grade raising. They have just survived a year, a pretty horrific year. So there is a major celebration of survival. The most important part of it takes place at Lucas Terrace, which was an apartment building that had been at the east end of the island where 55 people had died, but 22 had survived. And they have a big ceremony there with the survivors and children. The children are given salt cedar and oleander stems to go plant as an omen of the future. Since then, there have been other celebrations.
37:22 Speaker 04 Obviously, there was a fairly large event in 2000, the 100th anniversary. When the seawall is completed, there are posts at the end of that first section of the seawall. There are statues and there are plaques and there are other things, mostly along the seawall commemorating the orphan's home that was destroyed and other instances and other things that have happened since the storm.
37:46 Lindsay Graham? And how's the storm remembered today? I know I've walked by a few plaques.
37:50 Speaker 04 I think if you live in Galveston, if you were born there, if you have grown up in Galveston, it's always there. I lived there for a fairly long time in the late 20th century and people divide their lives before the storm and after the storm, especially if you're one of the old Galveston families and your family's been there for generations and for years and years. It's before the storm and after the storm. So the storm is very much a part of the island culture. There have been lots of books written about the storm. So the storm is sort of like ever with you. There are monuments all over and there have been storms since. I mean, if you go down to Post Office Street, which is one of the downtown streets, there's a building there that has different levels, that has gashes, has marks on the side on
38:33 Speaker 04 the corner about this was the 1900 storm level, this was the level of Hurricane Ike. So hurricanes are very much part of the fabric of the island, but this one still stands out and a lot of it is because of what came after it. The government change, the seawall and the grade raising, because that in many ways just both physically and culturally changed the island and created the island the way it is today.
38:56 Lindsay Graham? It does seem that the seawall and grade raising was completed just in time because there was another storm that hit in 1915. How did Galveston fare?
39:05 Speaker 04 Galveston did okay. That was, actually, that's where we end the book because the 1915 storm was a comparable storm. Looking back on it, this was before they had developed the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricanes. We think the 1900 storm was probably a category four storm. The one in 1915 was comparable, and the island did quite well. By 1915, the seawall is in place, the grade raising has finished. There's damage. I believe one of the bridges is lost between Galveston and the mainland, but there's nothing like the devastation that happened with 1900. Nothing at all. Basically, the seawall and the grade raising worked.
39:40 Lindsay Graham? Now, today, certainly hurricanes are something we reckon with every year, and we've seen great catastrophes hit many different cities. So what should people know about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston? What should we remember from this storm?
39:54 Speaker 04 Take hurricanes seriously. You know, people talk about the fact that Galvestonians ignored the overflow and ignored the water, but we do the same thing now with hurricanes. So we need to remember that hurricanes are very, very serious. The other piece I think that's important is the degree to which you can be open to change, to fix it. And I say fix it sort of tentatively because the grade raising and the seawall came with a whole lot of natural and environmental ramifications that we're sort of still working through. But the willingness of the people of Galveston to make these extreme changes and to try new paths and to allow new kinds of people power and to just do these new things to
40:38 Speaker 04 save their island and to save their city, I think is important to think about and think about what lengths you are willing to go to, to save an urban environment, to save a culture that you want.
40:49 Lindsay Graham? Well, Patricia Bixel, thank you so much for talking with me today on American History Tellers.
40:54 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me.
40:55 Lindsay Graham? That was my conversation with Dr. Patricia Bixel, author of Galveston and the 1900 Storm Catastrophe and Catalyst, co-authored with Elizabeth Hayes Turner.
41:06 Lindsay Graham? In our next series, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla begin as pioneers of a new electrical age, but soon become bitter rivals battling over which system will power the world. When Tesla teams up with George Westinghouse, the contest intensifies, pushing all three men toward a dramatic showdown over the future of modern electricity.
41:29 Lindsay Graham? American History Tellers is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.
42:06 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals, this is the fourth and final episode of our series on the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Paulie Stryker. Senior producers Alida Rosansky and Andy Beckerman. Managing producer Desi Blalock. Music by Thrum. Sound design by Molly Bach. Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis. Chief Content Officer, Rachel Kiyatza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.
42:56 Speaker 06 Hey, I'm Cassie DePecce, the host of Against the Odds from Audible Originals. In each episode, we share thrilling true stories of survival, putting you in the shoes of the people who lived to tell the tale. In our Latest series, we track the story of Hugh Glass, the real-life revenant that inspired the 2015 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. In 1823, Glass was brutally mauled by a grizzly bear in present-day South Dakota and left for dead. His survival depended on trekking through 350 miles of wilderness alone with grave injuries. But he was driven by his thirst for revenge. Follow Against the Odds wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
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