Settlement & Development
A Growing City in 1870
In 1870, Houston counted 9,382 residents and continued to grow quickly through the following decades. The city’s population increased by 77 percent, 67 percent, and 62 percent in the next three decades, and by 1900 it had surpassed 58,000 people. Houston drew many Americans looking for work, while the share of foreign-born residents declined from 17 percent in 1870 to 11 percent in 1890. The percentage of African-American residents remained steady during that period.
Houston received a new charter in 1870 that laid out eight wards. Local representation did not evenly match population: in 1870, the Fourth Ward had 3,055 residents, while the First Ward had 738. The city did not redraw ward boundaries to reflect these settlement patterns. The Sixth Ward was added in 1877.
Civic Life and the State Fair
Houston was designated an official port of entry on July 16, 1870. Many African Americans worked in unskilled labor at the time. White legislators insisted on segregated schools, and in the late 1870s white Democrats regained power in the state legislature, often after violence and intimidation used to suppress African-American voting.
Houston also hosted the first Texas State Fair in 1870. The Mechanical and Blood Stock Association of Texas held the first and second fairs on a temporary site north of Buffalo Bayou, then bought a more permanent fairground area within the Obedience Smith Survey, in the area more recently known as Midtown. The new site was first used in 1872, with streetcar service carrying visitors between the fairgrounds and central Houston. The last State Fair in Houston was held in 1878.
Streetcars and New Subdivisions
The Houston City Streetway Company began building and operating animal-powered streetcar lines in 1874. Its service developed in the business district, then centered on Congress Avenue and Main Street. One of its first four lines reached as far south as the Fairgrounds, and another ran on Congress to the International & Great Northern Railroad depot.
Suburban subdivisions appeared near the Fairgrounds around the same time. Residential developers used the emerging streetcar lines to promote these areas, although lot sales in the more remote sections did not move quickly in the 1870s. In 1883, the Bayou City Street Railway built its main line farther south on Texas Avenue. Later that year, William Sinclair and Henry MacGregor acquired both streetcar companies and consolidated their operations. From 1874 until 1891, all transit service used mule-driven streetcars, and electric streetcars began to replace them in 1891.
Manufacturing, Railroads, and Work
By the 1890 census, Houston had 210 manufacturers employing more than 3,000 workers, about 300 of them in white-collar positions. These businesses included metalworking operations such as blacksmith shops, iron foundries, and wheelwrights; woodworking businesses such as cabinet makers and millworks; and many publishers and printers.
More than 1,100 workers were employed by Houston railroads, many at the large shops of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, and the Houston, East and West Texas Railway.
The Houston Post was established in 1880, and the Houston Chronicle followed on August 23 of the same year. In 1887, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word established a hospital that would become St. Joseph Hospital.
Port Trade and Buffalo Bayou
Lumber became a large part of Houston’s port exports, while merchandise was its chief import. In the late nineteenth century, Houston was competing with Galveston for shares of ocean-going shipping trade.
In the 1890s, Houston business leaders persuaded United States Representative Joseph Chappell Hutcheson to introduce a bill for a federal grant to survey Buffalo Bayou. After Hutcheson left Congress, Thomas Henry Ball learned about the project from Houston businessmen and made Houston’s advocacy his main issue while serving in Congress. Ball was elected in 1896. Ball, Horace Baldwin Rice, and Charles Milby were among the Houstonians who led a tour of the ship channel for the House Committee on Rivers and Harbors.