The Houston Ship Channel & the Port That Built a City

Houston sits fifty miles from the sea, yet it is one of the busiest ports in the United States — because the city dug its way to the water. This drive follows the story of the Houston Ship Channel, the deepwater canal cut up Buffalo Bayou to the Turning Basin, and the older river town of Harrisburg it swallowed. It begins where John Richardson Harris founded a trading post in the 1820s, threads past the sites where Texas's first railroad ran and where a young republic's leaders sheltered before San Jacinto, and follows the water inland to the basin where, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in Washington to open the port to the ships of the world. Along the banks stand refineries, docks, and terminals — the industrial machine that turned a bayou town into an energy metropolis. This is the tour of the ditch that changed everything.