The Galveston Bay Hurricane Trail (1900 · Carla · Ike)

Galveston is a city built on a sandbar, and its history is a long conversation with the sea. On September 8, 1900, a hurricane came ashore here and killed an estimated six to eight thousand people — still the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. In its aftermath the island did two extraordinary things: it raised a great concrete seawall against the Gulf, and it jacked up the entire grade of the city behind that wall, sometimes by more than a dozen feet. This driving trail follows the scars and the defenses of a century of storms. It begins on the seawall where the memorials to 1900 stand, visits the grand houses and institutions that survived, then crosses to the industrial mainland at Texas City — battered by disaster and by wind — before tracing the upper bay toward the ground hit hard by Hurricane Carla in 1961 and Hurricane Ike in 2008. It is a somber but fascinating route: everywhere you look, the landscape has been shaped by water and by the stubborn refusal of coastal Texans to move away from it. Drive it with respect for the lives these storms took.