The Vanished Texas Coast with author Mark Lardas Pt. 2

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[00:00:46] Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash income. All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash income now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Welcome back to Crime Capsule. I'm your host, Benjamin Morris.

[00:01:19] This week we're continuing our conversation with Mark Lardis, author of The Vanished Texas Coast, Lost Port Towns, Mysterious Shipwrecks and Other True Tales, published by the History Press. If you missed the first part of our interview, including those amazing canals, be sure to

[00:01:37] look it up wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks as always for listening. Let's get back to it. Wow! Well, on that note, let us journey even deeper into the strange and bizarre moments of

[00:01:57] the past when we take a look at what happened in the Civil War to Indianola and to its undoing down the road. So you write that the Civil War years actually presented a novel experience for the residents of the area and that they were occupied.

[00:02:20] There were skirmishes, there were battles and they were occupied by the Union forces. Yes. They tried to control the Texas coast. They didn't try and go much inland and when they did, they generally had bad luck.

[00:02:35] There were other battles covered in other chapters of this book that show you exactly how strange things got. Indianola's occupation was pretty benign other than the fact that this is a port city and it depends on cargoes coming from inland and being shipped out and that stopped.

[00:03:00] So, you know, that was from an economic standpoint, that was a really hard time for Indianola and plus you had the humiliation of being occupied. And while there were portions of Texas that were very friendly to the north, the Texas coast wasn't one of them.

[00:03:28] So but the thing is that once the war ended, all of a sudden Indianola is how you get stuff inland again and it boomed from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the 1870s.

[00:03:47] Yeah, markets need to open back up and people are trying to resume some semblance of commerce that is critical for the region's survival, of course. And there was another factor at work too which was the fact that the Morgan line

[00:04:04] was in a feud with the port of Galveston because Galveston had previously given them free wharfage but then decided they were going to start charging and that ended up doing two things. One was Morgan started financing the construction of a channel to Houston to use

[00:04:30] Houston as a seaport. But what was a whole lot easier was to move a lot of his operations to Indianola. It was kind of like having the biggest shipping company on the coast decide that your city was the city it wanted to operate out of.

[00:04:49] And that being one of the absolute major means of commercial transport up and down the Gulf Coast flat out and throughout the entire Caribbean basin. I mean, if you have that company operating out of your harbor, you are bound for the stars, aren't you? Yes.

[00:05:07] And the only thing that threatened them was that Port Lavaca was going to put in a railroad and that would make Port Lavaca a more attractive port. Lavaca, Port Lavaca was further up the bay. And so what the citizens of Indianola did was finance a railroad to Indianola,

[00:05:31] which was finished in the mid 1870s. And everything was going great. Indianola was going to be the premier port in the state of Texas by 1900 maybe. Yeah, let me ask you then right at this moment because I think this is a

[00:05:52] really interesting moment for not just for narrative tension, but really in terms of urban planning and architecture and what it meant for Gulf Coast settlements to grow into what could be a hostile environment, atmospherically and climatically sometimes.

[00:06:11] What I want to ask you, Mark, is this, prior to what happened in 1875, Indianola had been there for 35, 40 years and so forth. And taking my cue from that great maritime work of cinematic genius, Jaws, I'm listening in the soundtrack here for a little bit of a dana, dana.

[00:06:38] Right. And I'm waiting to hear, was there a, in that 40 year history, had there been any storms along the bay or that stretch of coast that had given anybody an indication of the fury that Gulf of Mexico hurricanes could bring?

[00:07:03] Right. I mean, had there been any indication of what was coming? There was and there wasn't. There were storms, there were always storms. But the thing that a lot of people miss is the destruction that a hurricane does tends to be fairly narrow. Once you get the hurricanes,

[00:07:29] aren't atomic bombs, which just wipe out everything. The damage is focused in the area closest to the eye, and it has to be a really powerful storm. So if a hurricane went in on the far side of Lavaca Bay, yeah, it would tear up that far side.

[00:07:57] But Indianola would have just gotten some flooding. Out of rain bands, basically. The out of rain bands would have lashed the area. Well, even some of the middle rain bands, because the thing about

[00:08:13] hurricanes is the damage done is proportional to the square of the speed of the wind. So if you're at 30 mile an hour winds, you do one damage, you know, 60 miles, you might do two to three times the damage at 80 80 mile 90 mile winds.

[00:08:39] All of a sudden you're doing 16 times the damage. But it's kind of like a fairly steep hill. And the further away you get, the less the damage. So yeah, they had an idea that hurricanes could be bad.

[00:08:54] They just didn't know how bad until one made a direct hit on Indianola. And Indianola's problem was compounded because it wasn't open roadstead. There were no barrier islands between Indianola and the Gulf. So when the 17, I'm sorry, the 1875 hurricane comes roaring in there.

[00:09:25] It comes in with this just title surge that ends up not just flooding the town, but just scouring it. Yeah, it's a wall of water. I mean, for folks who've never seen it or experienced it,

[00:09:39] you're looking at a wall of water of millions of gallons that is bearing down upon a flat plane and just sweeping everything that is in front of it. Quite literally off its foundations, just sweep, you know, like a house made of matchsticks.

[00:09:56] And so very few things can withstand that kind of level of just pure force. But the thing is you don't have to get very far inland for the damage to go down dramatically. I mean, yeah, it's like a hammer blow for anything within five miles of the coast.

[00:10:16] But then beyond that, you're pretty safe. So while Indianola ended up getting really hammered, Port Lavaca did not. They got hurt, but not to the point where you end up losing most of the town.

[00:10:35] And the first one was bad enough that it resulted in, I mean, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of casualties from this one, weren't we? Right. The thing the problem, the thing is that after the first one, they told themselves, all this can't happen.

[00:10:51] This this is a once in a century thing. And they rebuilt the town, but they didn't do anything to protect the town from another hurricane. And then another one came through in 1886, which was just 11 years later. And this was about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

[00:11:18] If you live on the Gulf Coast, one of the things you do hope for are some tropical storms early in the season because they suck the heat out of the water of the Gulf. In this case, it did not. It was it was a fairly late storm.

[00:11:36] It had been a hot, pretty much rainless summer on the Texas coast. And when it went over the outer islands, Haiti, Hispaniola and Cuba, it hit a Gulf of Mexico that was just filled with energy and hot water.

[00:12:00] And so it ended up building into, I think it was a cat for storm. Now, the good news was this time, the last storm hit at night and people weren't aware that it was even at hand. And that was why the casualty rate was so high.

[00:12:16] This time, people recognized that there was a hurricane in the Gulf and it was heading their way. And they decided that maybe they'd leave town and give the hurricane a little extra room without them to to bother it.

[00:12:33] You know, I've got a reporter friend here in town who, whenever we see warm water in the Gulf in the summertime, he just he just calls that hurricane food. You know, and it's just amazing to see how quickly they can grow in a matter of hours.

[00:12:47] I mean, even not just days, but hours when they are exposed to that. And a cat for bearing down on a settlement of effectively wood frame houses and shops. I mean, what do you think is going to happen? Right? Yeah. And what was worse is

[00:13:03] if the water wasn't bad enough, there was a signal station there that had a lot of oil in it for the lamps. And it got swept off its foundations and the fuel there caught fire and set fire to the rest of the town.

[00:13:23] Talk about fire and water simultaneously. Yeah, if it's not one thing, it's another. I tell you what, there was one interesting detail I wanted to ask you about. And I know it's sort of we're compressing a lot of a lot of destruction and kind of, you know, rebuilding

[00:13:40] into a short sort of 10 to 10 to 12 period, you know, here. But there's a detail in one of these storms, which I thought was so interesting. And it's about the courthouse. You mentioned that the courthouse had it was built differently, that there was still activity in and around concrete.

[00:13:59] Yeah, exactly. And in fact, in one of these storms, there was a trial going on during the hurricane. I mean, what was happening there? The thing people forget is you didn't have the early warning of a hurricane, the way we do today or even into

[00:14:19] after 1900, it set up a hurricane warning system. All they saw were the clouds. And of course, when a hurricane is heading towards you, a lot of times the weather improves from the standpoint of it doesn't rain. Yeah, you've got a nice steady wind, but it's steady and

[00:14:45] things seem pretty good. And they had a they had a really big murder trial going on. And nobody saw any reason that they should postpone it because it wasn't like it was raining or anything. And until all of a sudden it was right.

[00:15:10] And they ended up trapped in the courthouse, which turned out to be the safest building in the town. And ironically, I think it was the defendant ended up leaving the building several time to rescue people

[00:15:27] that were floating by and drag drag them back into the guy who was accused of murder goes out, started saving lives. Right. As I recall, the whole trial had to do with a feud that was going on in that county at that time. It wasn't pure lawlessness.

[00:15:45] It was just lawlessness directed against one family again by another and vice versa. Did they did? I mean, did they acquit the guy because he managed to help help everybody out or what happened in the aftermath? You know, the two accused murderers saved several men.

[00:16:03] I think they disappeared before the trial could be reconvened. Kind of in the chaos, you mean? Yeah. It seems to me a reasonable proposition from the standpoint of those two because they probably had the opportunity to get away. So why?

[00:16:23] You know, and again, we're talking about a society that doesn't have telephones, doesn't have mass communications. Once you get outside of 50 miles, nobody has heard of you. So. Yep. Yep. And if you can find a horse, that's all you need to make your escape. Yeah. So.

[00:16:43] Or railroad or railroad or railroads go faster and they and you don't have to, you know, to stop and I guess you do have to feed and water them in a kind of chemical sense, maybe not so much a nutritional sense.

[00:16:57] But so let me ask you this, Mark. After 1886, the second storm, as you said, was just this kind of perfect blend of conditions of terrible, terrible conditions in order to. And I'm so sorry to have to sort of use this metaphor,

[00:17:15] you know, put the nail in the coffin, you know, of the town itself. I mean, people had had moved away between the storms. Some people had stayed. They kind of built back. But the second one, as far as the one to punch goes, the second punch was

[00:17:30] a knockout punch. It was a TKO. It really was because nobody felt safe shipping goods from Indianola to and from Indianola. More than that, I mean, the people had been through it twice. They actually picked up and moved their houses elsewhere. Some to Port LaVaca.

[00:17:53] Some as far away as Victoria, which is a fairly large, long way to take to move a house in a pre-mechanized era. You write that the state of Texas actually it's not just that people abandoned the site, the state of Texas declared Indianola dead. Pretty much.

[00:18:23] Although it was kind of like a coroner declaring the body dead. Fair. They didn't kill the city so much as they found that it was dead. So a lot of what had been done, a lot of the shipping moved to Port LaVaca.

[00:18:44] But more than that, a lot of it shifted either Galveston or Corpus Christi. There was a general feeling that it was unsafe to have a port at that particular location. And what's left? What's left when you go there now? Not terribly much.

[00:19:03] You can still see the foundations of the courthouse, although the the coast has shifted and the courthouse is now out in the middle of the water. There is a monument to Indianola. If you're going along the coast, and that's pretty much it. Isn't a whole lot there.

[00:19:27] I got curious and I just plugged it into the computer to see if I could find Indianola on the map, if it still turns up. And there were one or two hits on there. One thing that interested me, Mark, was that it's an east facing city.

[00:19:46] I had thought that it was more of a southerly facing city or was. But just with the particular orientation along the bay there, I mean, the east facing probably got a pretty hard hit from that store. A doubly hard hit from the storm.

[00:19:58] But you know, there I will say this, I did find it was not directly in Indianola, but it was kind of maybe a little further down the coast. There looks like there's one marina, which is now operating.

[00:20:10] And it looks like they've got pretty good hamburgers and some decent sized fish in that bayou. So maybe it's worth going to check it out. Yeah. But other than that, yeah, it is a lost city.

[00:20:27] It is under the waves and it exists pretty much only in our memories and in records like yours. Now, I have to ask you one question. Pussy photographs. Pussy photographs of poorly drawn camels, of course. I have to ask you one quick question before we begin to

[00:20:49] sort of turn our attention to what you're working on now. But everybody knows about the Galveston storm of 1900. You know, that's one of the most famous destructive deadly hurricanes in history. It is still as you write in your chapter on the Galveston storm,

[00:21:07] the standard by which all other storms are judged, which is a terrible, terrible, you know, sort of jewel in one's crown to have to wear. But I'm fascinated by the tension between Indianola and Galveston, which is to say they both got hit by incredibly powerful storms

[00:21:32] at different points in their growth and development. And yet, I mean, it's storms that threaten to wipe them both off the map. And yet Galveston is still here and Indianola isn't. So why is that? Because there were a couple reasons why.

[00:21:48] One is that Galveston realized after the 1900 storm, because Indianola had been hit by two storms in about 12 years. Galveston realized that they could be hit by another storm and that they better do something about it. And they ended up putting in a seawall.

[00:22:09] And more importantly, they literally raised the town so that it was at least 17 feet above sea level. And the that was the largest civil engineering project in the United States right on up to the construction of the Hoover Dam. And it was a massive effort.

[00:22:34] I've got some ghost stories about stuff that resulted from that, including a lost cannon. But we won't go into that. Next time, next time. Yeah. Yeah. But they literally raised the city and put in the seawall and then in 1916, it got hit by a hurricane

[00:22:58] that was even worse than the 1900 storm. But because of the seawall, it ended up not taking terribly much damage from that one at all. And that hurricane has actually been largely forgotten. Nobody talks about the 1916 hurricane, which which proves success is born.

[00:23:22] You know what else it proves? It's remarkable. Actually, Mark, you know, there's that all that is that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. This may be one of the very few instances in which somebody actually remembered the past

[00:23:34] so that they would not repeat it. It's astounding. The other thing is that Galveston had one advantage over Indianola in that its harbor was on the inland side of the barrier island. Whereas Indianola, the port was open to the sea and the city got pushed aside.

[00:24:01] The strand is on the north side of Galveston Island. And so a hurricane has to batter its way, not just through the seawall, but through the rest of the island. And since they raised the island, you know, it didn't suffer the same magnitude of destruction

[00:24:26] in 1916 as it had in 1900. And again, that's part of what I'm talking about when I'm saying that the energy of a hurricane tends to drop off exponentially. And you have to pretty much have a bullseye hit to get the amount of damage that you've gotten Galveston in 1900

[00:24:47] or in Indianola in 1875 and 1886. So but that seawall and the fact that they raised the island literally preserved Galveston. And yes, Galveston has been hit by hurricane since then. But it's pretty well survived them. Yeah, I ended up having to do jury duty in Galveston after Ike.

[00:25:24] And I swear that it really looked like pictures of bombed out Berlin in 1945 with all the stuff by the side of the road. And that's one reason that they're building they're planning on building something called the Ike Dyke, which will provide even more protection to Galveston Island,

[00:25:48] Galveston Bay and the Port of Houston. We need all the help we can get. And speaking from your neighboring state of Louisiana, you know, we were open to all all good ideas and we're trying to implement, you know, as many as we can as well.

[00:26:04] Well, it really has to be a bad storm to hurt New Orleans because New Orleans is fairly well inland, but it can be hurt. It can indeed, as we saw just most recently in Ida a couple of years ago, if you get the like you said,

[00:26:20] the right mix of elements and the right angle, the right strength, you know, anything can happen. So we remain we remain vigilant, shall we say? Let me ask you this for your book is so full of of interesting,

[00:26:35] you know, accounts like this and and really gives such a unique perspective on the depth of history along the Texas coastline. What are you working on now? The current book I'm working on is set half a continent away.

[00:26:55] Because it is about B-29s and Japanese night fighters in World War Two. And before that, I had finished a book on US submarines and Japanese aircraft carriers. Oddly enough, that has a Texas connection because one of the submarines involved was the Kavala,

[00:27:19] which is preserved in Galveston at Seawolf Park. And just coincidentally happens to be celebrating the 80th anniversary of its launch tomorrow. How about that? How about that? That is remarkable. We love a good, a good little coincidence, you know, like that. Well, they sound like very productive projects

[00:27:42] and we wish you all the best with them. If folks wanted to reach out and get a copy of Vanished Texas Coast or any of your other titles, the Vanished Houston Landmarks or any of the other histories you've written, what's the best place for them to do that?

[00:27:56] Depends on where they live. The most reliable way that you can get them is either directly from the Arcadia Publishing website or from Amazon. A lot of the local bookstores in Texas carry my books. But it's kind of catch as catch can.

[00:28:20] I keep having friends tell me that they see Vanished Texas Coast and Vanished Houston Landmarks and various Walgreens around here. But I've not seen them, but they're available. I would go online to get them. If you want an autographed copy,

[00:28:43] Schroeder's Book Haven in League City, where I live, will sell and ship an autographed copy to somebody. And my website is marklartis.com. M-A-R-K-L-A-R-D-A-S.C-O-M. Brilliant. Thank you so much. And we really appreciate you making the time for us when you are quite literally involved

[00:29:10] in figuring out how to get humanity back to the moon. So we're very grateful on that front and all the best to you in all your endeavors. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I enjoyed it. Thanks for listening.

[00:29:26] Our guest has been Mark Lardis, author of The Vanished Texas Coast, Lost Port Towns, Mysterious Shipwrecks and Other True Tales published by The History Press. To order a copy of the book, visit your local independent bookstore or visit ArcadiaPublishing.com.

[00:29:42] Join us next week as we continue our series on Lost Cities. See you then. Thanks, as always, to our producer, Bill Huffman, our production director, Richard Coyne, audio engineer Ian Douglas and our executive producers, Michael DeLoya and Gerardo Orlando. I'm your host, Benjamin Morris.

[00:30:01] Crime Capsule is a production of Evergreen Podcasts and a signature title of the Killer Podcasts Network. You can find Crime Capsule wherever you listen to podcasts. Discover more great true crime and paranormal programming at killerpodcasts.com, one of Scotland's most notorious unsolved murders

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