The Texas Navy & the Republic at Galveston

Before Texas was a state, it was a nation — and this harbor was the home of its navy. In the years of the Republic of Texas, from 1836 to 1845, Galveston served as the main naval base for a small fleet of sailing ships tasked with defending a young country's long, exposed coastline against Mexico. The same island was also being founded and built as a city in those very years by a handful of ambitious men who saw the deepwater harbor's promise. This short waterfront walk traces both stories at once: the naval station that gave the Republic its reach at sea, and the founders — men like Michel Menard and Samuel May Williams — who laid out the town around it. Keep an eye on traffic along the working waterfront, and imagine the harbor crowded not with modern ships but with the sloops and schooners of a brand-new republic.