Galveston’s Great Storm: Glitz to Horror in Hours

Schoolkids learn about the 1900 storm, but they rarely hear about the bodies draped from trees. Or the smoke from funeral pyres, so thick it choked sailors 50 miles offshore. Or the 90 orphans tied to 10 desperate nuns, their bodies found deep under the sand after the weather cleared.

The hurricane that crushed this island community 100 years ago this week was the deadliest natural disaster this country has ever seen. In one apocalyptic day, it transformed a city whose seaport was second only to New York’s into a landscape of kindling and at least 6,000 corpses. One-sixth of the population died.

Now a drowsy tourist town known for its Mardi Gras and Gulf Coast beaches, Galveston will relive the worst hours of its history this weekend. Bathed in Texas’ record-breaking heat wave, careening into another hurricane season, the city has launched a marathon observance of what’s called, simply, the Great Storm.

“Not a single building on the island was left undamaged,” said Alice Wygant, spokeswoman for the Galveston Historical Foundation. “It was the stupidest place in the world to build a city. The highest point on the island was 8.7 feet above sea level.”

So traumatic was the experience that those who lived through the storm often couldn’t bear to discuss it. On the disaster’s 50th anniversary, the Galveston Daily News mustered only one line commemorating the event that changed the city’s destiny.

But now, with a century to cushion the horror, the people of Galveston--along with weather buffs and historians from around the world--are gathering to observe the storm’s 100th anniversary and to ponder its legacy.

For the first time, many are learning that it was a mix of weather, scientific error, late 19th century world view and millennial technology that all converged to change the city’s fate.

Few Locals Worried at Height of Storm Season

Sept. 8, 1900, was high hurricane season for Galveston, but few locals were worried. The city was rich and striving, fiercely in contest with Houston, 45 miles to the north, for Texas dominance. Galveston boasted the state’s only deep water port, the country’s biggest trading site for cotton, and a sophisticated, party-loving merchant class that had the first electricity and telephones in all of Texas.

And although they weathered hurricanes routinely, they thought geography inured them from disaster. In 1891, Texas Weather Bureau Chief Isaac Cline had declared in a newspaper that the shallow water around Galveston shielded it from major storms.

At the cusp of a new century, the opinions of the dandyish, mustachioed young Cline held the weight of solid fact, writes author Eric Larson in his 1999 bestseller, “Isaac’s Storm.” Although without modern tools such as radar, Cline was a distinguished meteorologist, embodying the era’s belief that science could master the elements. But then a Florida storm defied Cline’s predictions, turning toward Galveston, and the wafer-flat city was swamped beneath the bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

By 7:30 p.m., winds topped 120 miles an hour. A tidal surge as high as 15.7 feet engulfed the city. The monstrous waves drove houses near the water inland, smashing down the structures in their path. Residents hacked holes into their floors, hoping to stabilize their piered houses, but thousands of buildings filled slowly with seawater, then collapsed.

At St. Mary’s Orphans Asylum, 10 nuns lashed themselves to 93 small children as the water seeped up to their second-story refuge. Finally it swallowed them, drowning all except three boys who scrambled free and swam away. The rest were swept to shore and buried under tons of ocean-swept sand.

‘Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead Everywhere’

Convinced the storm would ebb, Cline stayed with his family in their two-story house. Before it toppled, his two oldest girls leaped out with an uncle, and Cline and his youngest daughter followed shortly after. But his pregnant wife was pulled under and drowned. Hours later, according to Larson, the surviving relatives were floating on an unhinged door, when the family retriever saw them and swam aboard. The dog sniffed each person, seemed to realize that Cline’s wife was gone, and plunged back in the water, apparently to find her. The retriever was never seen again.

When the storm finally calmed at midnight, the island was afloat with corpses, moaning victims and shattered buildings. “Dead, dead, dead, dead everywhere,” the Daily Times Herald of Dallas wrote Sept. 13, after the water had receded. “The bodies of human beings, infants, aged and carcasses of animals are strewn on every hand--The bay is alive with them.”

But if the storm was otherworldly in its horror, the aftermath was epic in another way. Under martial law, all able-bodied men were forced to work. Coerced at gunpoint, 50 men filled barges with corpses; after each load, the workers were given dippers of whiskey. But the bodies, fixed with weights and dropped at sea, swept back ashore, so vast funeral pyres were built on shore instead. They burned for two months straight, filling the air with nauseating fumes.

Thousands of survivors fled the city for good. Those who stayed behind began rebuilding within days. With funds from local and federal governments and businesses, engineers began to raise the island’s buildings, filling in the space beneath with 16 million cubic yards of sand. By 1911, 500 city blocks had been lifted as much as 11 feet.

The city also built a sea wall--a gargantuan task that took 60 years to reach its current length of more than 10 miles. But the city the survivors wrenched back was a very different place. It wasn’t just the hurricane that made it so, but the 20th century itself. Within a decade, technology to build deep water ports had brought a rival port to Houston. The cotton trade began to dwindle; oil was struck at Spindletop, near Houston, within a year of the hurricane. The island’s limited space soon seemed antiquated by the sprawl of mainland cities.

What Galveston retained--and finally grew to value--was its 19th century nature, former Mayor Barbara Crews says. Although it contends with a shortage of jobs and affordable housing, the city’s air of battered gentility attracts swarms of Houston visitors each weekend.

Storm Anniversary a Celebration of Survival

The Strand district--once called the Wall Street of the West--now houses antique shops and a yearly Dickens pageant. Tour guides lead visitors through refurbished mansions, weaving ghost stories that rival those of New Orleans.

Typical of a city once famed for its sparkling society, Galveston this year has fashioned the storm anniversary into a celebration of survival, including films, parties and a specially commissioned dance concert, along with somber memorials for the dead.

“Galveston has a lot of celebrations--it’s one thing we’re very good at,” Crews says. “We have good parties, we have good Mardi Gras, we celebrate the openings of hotels and buildings.”

The city wants the Great Storm--which came before the tradition of naming hurricanes even began--to take its place in the public mind alongside better-known modern hurricanes such as Camille, Andrew and Floyd.

Storm Memorial Statue to Be Dedicated Today

The city held a memorial service Friday for the hurricane victims, hosted by CBS anchorman Dan Rather. A former Texas newsman, Rather first gained national attention covering Hurricane Carla on the Gulf Coast in 1961.

Today, Galveston’s first storm memorial statue will be dedicated along the sea wall. On Sunday, the public library will hold a reading of a new book, “Through a Night of Horrors,” edited by Shelly Henley Kelly and Casey Edward Greene.

The expansive commemoration has earned praise from many longtime residents, many of whom heard about the storm in grade school but are fascinated by the details they’re hearing now.

“I didn’t really think about it until I started hearing about it on TV,” said secretary Lesia Tower, unwinding on the porch of her weathered wooden house. Across the street, a spectacularly redone Victorian bears a newly installed plaque proclaiming it a 1900 storm survivor.

Now, Tower said, the hurricane has her hooked. She is popping in the library at lunchtime, reading 1900s newspapers. “Now I’ve got a chance to learn about it,” Tower said. “What it was. How bad it was.”