Two hundred years of ships at Galveston, and every one of them was worked by somebody. Screwmen packing cotton by hand, longshoremen on the cotton wharves, grain handlers, car-carrier crews, and the porters at the curb today. This is their port. Read a little of it, then add your own.
Mexico names Galveston a provisional port and customs post on October 17, at Stephen F. Austin’s urging. The oldest port west of the Mississippi starts here.
Galveston is chartered in 1839. In 1854 the waterfront operators join as the Galveston Wharf and Cotton Compress Company — the private firm that would one day become the Port of Galveston.
Men who packed cotton into ships’ holds with jackscrews — skilled, dangerous, well-paid work — form the Screwmen’s Benevolent Association. It is one of the first labour organisations on the Texas waterfront.
Born into slavery, Cuney becomes the leader of Galveston’s Black dock workers, who were shut out of the white screwmen’s union. In 1883 he brings longshoremen from New Orleans, wins a stevedoring contract from Morgan Lines, and founds the Screwmen’s Benevolent Association No. 2. The same year he is the first Black alderman elected in Galveston; in 1889 he is appointed Collector of Customs for the port.
$6.2 million in federal money cuts the harbour to deep water. By 1899 Galveston is the foremost cotton port on earth and the fifth port in the United States; two million bales leave in 1900 alone.
The deadliest natural disaster in American history: six to eight thousand dead, the city wrecked. Galveston answers with a seventeen-foot seawall and raises the whole city behind it, house by house. The wharves are working again within weeks.
Dockworkers strike for a 25-cent raise and the right to bargain through the International Longshoremen’s Association. The governor sends the National Guard and declares martial law on the waterfront. It ends in January 1921 with a seven-cent raise — and the ILA on the Galveston docks to stay.
Galveston purchases the private wharves. The Board of Trustees of the Galveston Wharves runs the port from then on, as it does today.
The cotton era fades and the port reinvents itself again and again: grain elevators, banana ships, bulk sulfur and fertiliser, roll-on roll-off carriers of cars and machinery, and a ship-repair yard across the channel on Pelican Island.
Year-round cruising from Galveston starts, and a new trade is born on the old cotton wharves: porters at the curb, tags, and tens of thousands of bags a weekend. Within two decades Galveston is one of the busiest cruise ports in the country.
Royal Caribbean’s Terminal 10 opens in 2022; Terminal 16 on the old Del Monte fruit site in 2025; the West Port Cargo Complex gets a new 1,434-foot berth in 2026. The port is two hundred years old and still being built.
Sources: Port of Galveston bicentennial history, Texas State Historical Association (Galveston Wharves), Galveston Historical Foundation, Rosenberg Library. Dates are the port’s and the historians’; the stories below are yours.
Five-man gangs with jackscrews forcing extra bales into a hold until the ship’s timbers creaked. Dangerous, skilled, and the best-paid work on the waterfront — the aristocrats of the dock, until compressed cotton and bigger ships made them history.
Everything else that crossed a wharf, by hand, by hook, by cart. The men who struck in 1920 are the grandfathers of the ILA locals working the port today.
The newest trade on the oldest wharves. Every bag that boards a cruise ship from Galveston passes through a porter’s hands at the curb — tagged, checked, sent to the cabin. Dockside was built by them.
Shared by locals, porters, longshoremen, crew and families who have a connection to the port. Read, then add yours below.
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