"One of those monstrosities of nature": The Galveston Storm of 1900

Dawn brought "mother of pearl" skies to Galveston, Texas, that Saturday morning of September 8, 1900. The city of 38,000, perched on an island just off the mainland, had an elevation of no more than nine feet. With no sea wall to protect it from approaching storms, the city was extremely vulnerable. Weather reports suggested that a tropical disturbance over Cuba could be headed northwest through the Gulf of Mexico. An abundance of sea water already filled the streets, alleys, and yards. Historically, the city had often experienced inundations from the Gulf of Mexico and from Galveston Bay. In 1873, the city government mandated the construction of elevated sidewalks on the Strand, the main commercial thoroughfare, to keep the knee-deep water out of stores and businesses. Most houses were built on pilings so that yards would flood while homes stayed dry. Storms had flooded Galveston before, but there was little to suggest that the impending one would be a monster hurricane. 

The Galveston Weather Bureau was still in its infancy, having been established under the supervision of meteorologist Dr. Isaac M. Cline in 1889. In early September 1900, Cline and his brother Joseph sensed that something bigger than an average storm was coming toward Galveston. On Friday the 7th, they hoisted a red flag with a black center over the tall Levy Building in the middle of the city, to alert the populace that a dangerous weather system was approaching. By mid-morning on Saturday, rain was falling, and Isaac Cline drove his buggy to the beach to warn visitors to seek higher ground and take shelter in strong buildings. He made sure that those people living near the beaches heard the message and encouraged them to leave their homes for safer structures. Many who took his advice were saved, but others, who chose to stay and weather the storm in their own homes, faced disaster. Galveston resident Henry Wortham remembered that "while hundreds perhaps thousands thought of the prediction very few heeded the danger signals."[1] When Cline returned to the local Weather Bureau he telegraphed the national Weather Bureau in Washington, DC: "Unusually heavy swells from southeast . . . overflowing low places south portion [of] city three to four blocks from beach."[2]

The last train to leave the island departed at 9:00 a.m., but a lone train from Houston, filled with unsuspecting passengers, chugged into Galveston station at 1:00 p.m. Passengers on a train from Beaumont to the east of the city became stranded on the other side of Galveston Bay and had to take refuge in a lighthouse. By early afternoon the Gulf waters covered the streets and half of the city; the tide was six feet above normal. By 5:00 p.m. the wind gauge, registering 100 miles per hour, had blown away, and by 9:00 p.m. the barometer dropped to 28.48 inches, its lowest point. Earlier that day, the rain and wind had been great enough to knock out all telegraph communication. Galveston would be out of touch with the rest of world until Sunday the 9th.

Many residents had considered that Saturday a normal workday and had headed downtown to their workplaces. By noon they realized that this would be no ordinary "overflow" and many returned, or tried to return, to their homes and families. By afternoon, streetcars had stopped running, so walking or riding buggies with horses fretting in the high water became the only means of transportation. August Rollfing returned to his home to find that his wife Louisa had made no dinner and was frantic to reach higher ground. He immediately hired a horse and carriage, but the driver could not get them to their initial destination because the horse was up to its neck in water and "the electric wires were down everywhere."[3] The family of five eventually found shelter with August’s brother. Those who chose to stay in their homes—and survived—wrote harrowing accounts of the water climbing up over the ceiling of the first floor while they huddled in upstairs rooms or took refuge on the roof. Louisa Rollfing recalled that after she and her family fled upstairs, they "heard the blinds and windows break . . . and it sounded as if the rooms were filled with a thousand little devils, shrieking and whistling."[4] In the rooms downstairs the furniture, even the piano, skidded across the floor. When they heard a huge crack, they knew that the kitchen had been torn away from the house. At that point, the house was lifted off two of its pillars and hung precariously askew.

The Rollfings were lucky to survive. Isaac Cline, who had warned people to seek refuge in fortified structures, decided to stay at home with his family. Fifty people sought shelter in the Cline home and were there when darkness fell. The storm strengthened, reaching its peak between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. with winds of approximately 120 miles per hour. The Clines and the refugees huddled in utter blackness until a fifteen-foot surge of water made the house creak and shudder. Then, an uprooted train trestle, driven by wind and water, bashed into the house, causing it to lurch off its foundation and fling its human contents into the raging sea. Cline, who had blacked out initially, found his daughter, his brother, and his two other children desperately clinging to the wreckage. They survived, but eighteen others in the house "were hurled into eternity," including Cline’s wife, whose body was found beneath their home.[5] St. Mary’s Catholic Orphan Asylum at the west end of the island was completely destroyed. All ten of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word perished along with ninety-one children. Only three teenage boys survived by holding onto a floating tree for two days.

Those who had heeded Cline’s warnings sought safety in stone and brick buildings in the city’s center. The Tremont Hotel in downtown Galveston and the Ursuline Convent each housed 1,000 refugees; more than 400 were sheltered at City Hall. Four women gave birth to live babies during the storm; one woman who was tossed from her collapsing home landed in a floating trunk and arrived at an upper-story window of the convent. The Sisters pulled her in, and she was delivered of a baby boy that night. Her older son was also rescued and the three were united. All the newborns were christened immediately, for who could predict the outcome of that night of terror? The disaster knew no racial boundaries; black citizens huddled alongside whites in the Union Passenger Station, the Ursuline Convent, or in private homes. Daniel Ransom, an African American who had built his house near the beach, survived the collapse of his home, and because he was an excellent swimmer, he rescued forty-five people from drowning.

When Sunday morning dawned, survivors looked upon the horror of the night’s wreckage, which would haunt them for years. Bodies were strewn about the island, seen floating in the bay or found hanging from the salt cedar trees by the shore. The death toll of the 1900 storm has never been established with certainty, but the numbers range between 6,000 and 12,000. This constitutes the nation’s greatest disaster in terms of loss of life. Estimates of the hurricane’s damage range from $17 to $30 million, or in current terms, $827,094,622. The hurricane demolished 4,000, or two-thirds, of the city’s buildings—homes, offices, and churches. Not a single public structure escaped damage. One wall of the three-story Bath Avenue School was torn away, exposing a drooping third story with desks still bolted to the floor. The area of the city that suffered the greatest damage was that closest to the sea. When the fifteen-foot storm surge along with gale force winds hit the clapboard houses, they collapsed and became battering rams against nearby structures. Whole neighborhoods were swept away. When August Rollfing returned to his neighborhood he found "Nothing! Absolutely nothing! The ground was as clear of anything as if it had been swept, not even a little stick of wood or anything for blocks and blocks."[6]

The storm left a three-mile long, thirty-foot pile of debris made of shattered houses, barns, sheds, outhouses, dead animals, and human corpses. The neighborhoods at the east and west ends of the city were totally destroyed, leaving only a denuded stretch of land as if some giant scythe had swept over the earth. A majority of the victims were working-class citizens whose dwellings could not withstand the onslaught. Those who escaped death were wealthy and lived in substantial dwellings. Some survivors took shelter in stone or brick structures, while others were lucky enough to swim out of their collapsed homes and cling to bits of debris in the roily sea. Most of the city’s leaders survived, and they soon created a Central Relief Committee (CRC), which began delegating tasks for the recovery—food distribution, cleaning, debris removal, tent housing, and rebuilding. In the September heat the bodies began to decay; the ground was too saturated to bury the dead, so the CRC members decided to burn them in great funeral pyres spread across the white sands. The smoke from the smoldering mounds covered the city for six weeks, releasing a stench that many survivors remembered long after the island’s recovery.

Clara Barton, aged seventy-eight, and her American National Red Cross workers arrived on the island nine days after the storm; it was her last on-site emergency relief experience. Barton’s first impressions of the island convey the extent of the disaster: "It was one of those monstrosities of nature which defied exaggeration and fiendishly laughed at all tame attempts of words to picture the scene it had prepared."[7] In cooperation with the CRC, Red Cross workers sent out a call for donations of goods and funds. Barton, as president of the Red Cross, vouched for the authenticity of need presented by the disaster, and donors responded with gifts in kind, which the workers distributed. She created an orphanage and the Galveston Red Cross Auxiliary No. 1, giving middle-class white women an opportunity to work at the distribution stations and take on civic leadership positions. This led in 1901 to the creation of the Women’s Health Protective Association, a powerful force for Progressive-era municipal housekeeping in Galveston. By creating a black Red Cross Auxiliary, Barton made sure that African Americans were treated fairly in the distribution of goods, including donations from black communities. Finally, she convinced the CRC leaders that they must invest in housing before winter closed in, and she helped set up a building committee comprised of the city’s most prominent leaders. Her insistence led to a national campaign to fund 483 houses costing between $300 and $350 each. Owners of damaged homes, 97 percent of which were impaired by the storm, received loan assistance for repairs.

The clean-up took an entire year. Workers, who were mostly drafted, were paid the same wages regardless of race. The storm, today considered a category four by meteorologists, served as the catalyst for a number of reforms: civic leaders created the first city commission government, erected a seventeen-foot sea wall to protect the island, and raised the island to meet the height of the sea wall, saving the city from the kind of disaster experienced in 1900. The next hurricane hit the island in 1915 with only eight deaths and much less structural damage. The efforts had been worth the investment.

The city’s full economic recovery took twelve years, and its population growth remained slow. With the construction of the $1.5 million Hotel Galvez in 1911, the city appealed to tourists, beachgoers, businessmen, and investors. The next year Galveston County financed the construction of a multi-lane causeway from the island to the mainland to accommodate greater automobile, train, and interurban traffic. By 1912, Galveston had repaired and modernized its damaged wharf to become the second largest port in the United States, exceeded in the value of its exports and imports only by New York City. Galveston in 1912 was the leading cotton port in the world, shipping over four million bales a year. Its exports totaled nearly $292 million. The completion of the Panama Canal enhanced Galveston’s trade position, enabling commercial traffic with South America. In 1913 Galveston created an immigration station that opened up the Midwest to some 10,000 immigrants. The disaster that hit the city in September 1900 had left Galvestonians dazed and grieving, but out of that experience of death, damage, and disruption came a determined desire for recovery. As one survivor wrote, "Galveston will be rebuilt more beautiful, more massive, more enduring than before."[8]  

Elizabeth Hayes Turner is Professor of History at the University of North Texas. She is the co-author, with Patricia Bellis Bixel, of Galveston and the 1900 Storm (University of Texas Press, 2000).