The Fifty Fifty Plan

Houston is a great port fifty miles from the sea, and the fact was bought with a piece of financial engineering as important to the city as any oil well. Dredging Buffalo Bayou had been the local ambition since the 1860s, and after the 1900 hurricane destroyed Galveston the case for an inland harbour became urgent, but Congress would not pay for the whole dig. In 1909 Mayor Horace Baldwin Rice took a delegation to Washington with what became known as the Houston Plan: the county would pay half. The Rivers and Harbors Committee accepted it in June 1910, Harris County voters approved a bond of a million and a quarter dollars, and a local cash match on a federal navigation project was, at the time, unheard of. The dredges finished on 7 September 1914. On 10 November President Woodrow Wilson pressed an ivory button at his desk in the White House and fired a cannon on the bayou, and Sue Campbell, daughter of the mayor by then, Ben Campbell, scattered white roses on the water and declared the port open to the boats of all nations. The timing was almost indecently good: oil had been coming out of the Gulf Coast fields since Spindletop, and tankers, refineries and pipelines wanted exactly what the channel offered, deep water beside cheap flat land. The complex that bond paid for now moves more waterborne tonnage than any other port in the United States.