Texas’ First Railroad (Jan 5, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
I think it is impossible to exaggerate the historical consequences and impact of railroads on United States history. Their spread and building played a large role in making the U.S. an actual “nation” because they linked regions together, were the first national business, and their organization became a model for the way other American corporations began to operate; finally, for better or more often worse, they shaped the way American business related to and treated its workers. Texas’ history with railroad building somewhat mirrored that of the rest of the nation, and by 1911, Texas had become the state with the most railroad mileage in the nation, a position it continues to maintain. After all, it’s a big state.
As with all things, someone or some thing has to be “first,” and in Texas, the first chartered railroad line came in February 1850 with the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway Company, which later (1870) changed its name to the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway Company. When it finally became operational, the BBB&C was the second railroad west of the Mississippi River. It would eventually become a part of the Southern Pacific Transportation Company, which was the fourth incarnation of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the second transcontinental railroad in the United States.
A group of mostly Galveston and Houston investors formed the BBB&C in 1849 and received a successful charter from the state of Texas on February 11, 1850. The company began the laborious process of acquiring land and rights-of-way for the remainder of 1850 and, in 1851, began the slow process of constructing a line. The BBB&C began in Harrisburg, at that time a town on the right bank of Buffalo Bayou in eastern Harris County (it is now a neighborhood contained within the larger city of Houston). The railway company bought the town plot for $150,000, with plans to make it the headquarters and focal point of their new line. Railroad construction at that time was an arduous task that involved essentially hand-building and laying a line. The first segment of the railroad was to connect Houston and Austin. The area where the BBB&C had to construct was heavily timbered with dense undergrowth, as well as one that followed a gradual, but still somewhat substantial, grade. After nine years, the BBB&C had only constructed about eighty miles of track, and it had only reached near Columbus when the Civil War began and stopped construction.
The Civil War not only stopped the completion of the line, but it also led to a liquidation of the company in 1867 when its assets were seized by Harris County for non-payment of taxes and other liabilities. The Harris County Sheriff’s Auction in July 1867 included the BBB&C on its agenda, which led William D. Sledge to purchase what was left of the line’s assets. Sledge then sold seventy-five percent of the company to Jonathan Barrett, a Boston financier, Galveston business magnate John Sealy, and another northeasterner, Thomas W. Peirce, who would take the lead in organizing and developing the new line. Peirce, who with his brother Dover had organized a mercantile firm in Boston, had built an extensive network of trade in the southern United States before the Civil War and had also owned and operated a small spur rail line—the Houston Tap and Brazoria—that had connected his sugar plantation to the BBB&C. The new owners organized their purchase into the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway.
The new company, under a charter granted by the Texas legislature, now made reaching San Antonio the company’s primary endeavor, eschewing the original goal of building to Austin. They began construction from Columbus in April 1873 but, again, construction was fairly slow. The line reached Schulenburg in December 1873,, and only to Marion by the spring of 1875. The now GH&SA did not reach the Alamo City until February 1877, almost four years after they had set out to build the one hundred and twenty-five-mile track from Columbus. The line did generate profits and became a key conduit connecting San Antonio to the Gulf Coast. Now, the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway was ready for its next extension.
Collis P. Huntington is a name recognized by most as one of the giants of the American rail industry. He was a member of the so-called “Big Four,” along with Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, who had pioneered the construction of the first intercontinental railroad in the United States. By the mid-1870s, Huntington controlled the Southern Pacific interests, a rail consortium in which Thomas Peirce had also invested. Peirce and Huntington, in 1878, reached an understanding that the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio would act for the Southern Pacific in extending their line from San Antonio to El Paso as part of the Southern Pacific’s efforts to construct another transcontinental railway line. Huntington’s SP crews had begun building the line eastward out of California, and by 1880, they had reached Arizona and were extending the line at a fast pace. Huntington had bought a sizable stake in the Galveston Harrisburg line in 1881, and buoyed by the new funding, Peirce, in that same year, sent his crews to El Paso to begin building eastward, while other crews in San Antonio began building the line to the west. In what can only be termed a “sprint” in nineteenth-century railroad building terms, the two crews linked up in January 1883 when Peirce himself drove a silver spike west of the Pecos River to signal the completion of the new line.
The GH&SA had built almost six hundred and forty miles of track across Texas in less than two years. As a Southern Pacific subsidiary, after building some other eastern Texas lines running into Houston and Galveston, by the 1920s, the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio—the inheritor of the original Buffalo Bayou, Brazos, and Colorado line—controlled and operated over thirteen hundred miles of track in Texas, which was forty percent of all the track mileage in the state.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.