(The following story by Heather Nolan appeared on The Enterprise website on August 13.)
BEAUMONT, Texas — An accidental discovery in the 1800s has had one of the biggest economic impacts on Beaumont to date.
According to the book “Beaumont: A Chronicle of Promise,” in the mid-1840s “a large oceangoing schooner somehow made its way up the Neches to Beaumont. Its captain took a sounding in the center of the river discovering, to everyone’s astonishment, that the depth of the river at the end of the Pearl Street dock was over 60 feet.”
But it wasn’t until April 12, 1916, that the Port of Beaumont officially opened.
According to a historical document from the Port of Beaumont, by the 1930s the port was handling more than a quarter-million tons of cargo annually.
At the turn of the 20th century, Arthur Stilwell built the Kansas City Southern Railroad from Kansas City through Beaumont, hoping to establish a terminal at the Sabine River, the document stated.
“His dream was to have a gateway from the Midwest to the ocean to effectively make Kansas City like an ocean port,” John Roby, director of logistics and public affairs at the Port of Beaumont.
Roby added that when his competition found out what he was doing, they bought all of the waterfront property near the mouth of Lake Sabine so Stilwell couldn’t get there. Stilwell was determined, built the railroad to Port Arthur and began a $1 million project to dig a 100-foot wide, 25-foot deep canal.
Railroads continue to be important to the port. It currently handles three: the BNSF Railway, Kansas City Southern Lines and Union Pacific System.
“We have some of the best rail connections you’ll ever find in a port,” Roby said. “They pan out over the country.”
In 1920, the port handled a ship a day, a total of 367 sailings handling 2,641,651 tons of cargo.
Expansion and widening continued through the years, allowing bigger ships to come through the port and import and export more cargo.
Beaumont historian Judy Linsley said that in its early years, most of the port’s cargo was lumber, rice and petrochemicals related to the oil industry.
Imported grain came into the port with the addition of the Kansas City Southern Railroad, she added.
Linsley also said that in the 1930s the port exported sand, probably from the river bottom, and cotton.
Research shows that also in the 1930s, right before World War II, the port had a lot of scrap iron and steel it was selling to Japan.
Roby said the port operated as a department of the city until 1949 with an amendment to the state constitution when the State Legislature created the Port of Beaumont Navigation District of Jefferson County. This gave the port the authority to assess a maintenance and operations tax and to issue bonds for wharf and dock improvements, the document stated.
Beaumont is the busiest U.S. military port, second in the world to Kuwait. More than 1.25 million tons of military cargo has been shipped from the port to Iraq and Afghanistan since the war started.
“They liked Beaumont because of the rail connections,” Roby said. “We have several very large military bases that handle heavy equipment close to us.”
Roby said the port owns about 455 acres of property in Orange County directly across the Neches River and another 238 acres farther downstream. He said the port is working on deepening and widening the channel again and is building a dock to handle a 20-acre cargo-storage area for pipe storage.
Roby said port business has continually increased over the years “because of the inland transportation – meaning railroads and highways – and where we are geographically in the center of the Gulf of Mexico.”
“There’s 60 million people that live within 500 miles of the Port of Beaumont,” he said. “This is the place to be if you want to get stuff to the middle of the country.”