Lake Jackson & the Dow Chemical Company Town

Lake Jackson is one of the great planned towns of twentieth-century Texas. When Dow Chemical opened a vast wartime plant on the Brazoria County coast in the early 1940s, it needed housing for thousands of workers — and it turned to architect Alden B. Dow, son of the company's founder and a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design an entire community from scratch. Alden Dow laid out curving, tree-lined streets that famously end in the word "Way" — Winding Way, Circle Way, Center Way — and designed the town's first homes and public buildings himself. This driving tour visits Alden Dow's own office building, the city's history museum, and the older colonial-era ground the town was built upon, tracing how a chemical company conjured a city out of coastal prairie. Drive carefully and pull over safely at each stop.