Angleton vs Brazoria: Bloods and Crips of Brazoria County
This county is full of rival towns. Here we compare its ancient seat and its modern one.
So the settlement of this county was always kind of unstable. What used to be Velasco is now Surfside; and after Velasco vamanosed inland because of hurricanes, it was devoured by Freeport.
The town of East Columbia wants you to believe it is older than West Columbia, but it isn’t; not really. It was founded as a mere dock on the Brazos called Bell’s Landing, and it had that name for decades while a couple of miles west, the upstart town of plain old Columbia enjoyed a brief turn in the sun as the capital of the Republic of Texas. Those days passed pretty quick, and eventually Bell’s Landing decided to change the name of the town to East Columbia, and for some reason leadership in plain Columbia caved and renamed themselves West Columbia. Which, given the general westward tilt of American migration, makes them sound like the upstart town, when in fact they were not.
Each of these places were founded by one Josiah Bell, who apparently envisioned a metropolis combining the two, as when you approach from the east on the Hug-the-Coast Highway (officially known as 35), there are a couple of blink-and-you-missed-them turnoffs for East Columbia. And then, at the eastward fringe of West Columbia, your arrival in town is heralded by a cross street called 10th Street. Apparently, first through ninth were supposed to be in East Columbia and in between, but they remain unplatted to this day. Infill unfulfilled.
Chaos likewise reigns in Brazoria and also with its relationship to faraway Angleton. Originally, the town of Brazoria, founded way back in the Mexican days of 1828, hugged the Brazos and was the county seat. It was a place of some importance: future president Dr Anson Jones and some other Republic of Texas bigwigs founded the first chapter of the Texas Freemasons there, under one of the city’s many venerable and majestic Spanish moss-draped live oaks. Apparently it too briefly served as the capital of the Republic, but its tenure was even shorter than that of Columbia. It did enjoy a long turn as the county seat of its eponymous county, and once there was a majestic courthouse there:
It’s long gone; today, this is all that remains:
The same goes for the rest of the old town. When the railroad came, it laid its track about two miles west of the Brazos, so Brazoria’s leaders picked up what they could and moved it to the tracks, with what used to be western Brazoria suddenly finding itself eastern Brazoria. (Today, the old town, hard as it is by the river, looks much newer and shabbier than the new town; Brazos flooding has devastated it time and time again and nothing old remains.)
Circa 1895, a scheme was launched in northern Brazoria County to reseat the county in the upstart town of Angleton, and as was not uncommon in that era, the plan was successful. I’ve posted elsewhere about the courthouses there, but today I want to get into the soul of the county, which I believe resides in the history museums.
In short, Angleton has abdicated its role as the memory-keeper of Brazoria County. Angleton seems not to care about any history in this part of Texas that occurred before its own founding. As a whole, the town seems to have an identity crisis, unsure of whether it is a bedroom community for Pearland or Houston, or whether it is aligned with white-collar Lake Jackson or blue-collar Freeport. The downtown kind of sprawls without a center; the court house is not on a square but rather a sort of campus, the better to accommodate the new courthouse and its annex (as befits a county with such explosive growth up by Houston) and the old one, which it has badly remodeled (removing the clocktower), repainted a bland white, and given over to a history museum.
Of sorts. I say that because it’s among the weakest I’ve ever been too, especially given that it’s housed in what was once a grand old building. I’ve seen town museums in former banks and saloons with better collections, and as for the staff, with one exception, they acted as if imposed upon to have a visitor. Which one might well imagine they are, because there just isn’t much there to entice a visitor within.
I went to cover a story about the role of women in the early days of the American railroad, and the Union Pacific’s PR department had provided an exhibit I was told (by a historian with the UP) was supposed to be paired with local artifacts. Brazoria County has a very rich railroading history, with at least one very notable female figure prominent in its past, so I was expecting to see an interesting combined exhibit that would be an inspiration to the youngsters of Brazoria County, especially young girls.
Nope: they had simply unfolded the standing placards furnished by the UP in one of the hallways and that was that. No local context, no mention of Dr. Sofie Herzog, the Brazoria County woman I just alluded to, or anything else regarding local women in the railroads-wise, and the rest of the exhibits there were equally lackluster. I don’t recall much about any of them, and flicking back through my camera, I see that nothing grabbed my interest enough to invest with even a few bytes on my phone’s memory.
(I do understand that the county archives are also there and occupy plenty of space; one can only hope they are curated with more care.)
Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever gone to Angleton for anything other than Whataburger or a cup of coffee and come away anything other than disappointed. I won’t say there’s no there there, but it just feels unaligned: not proudly blue-collar like Freeport, or snooty like Lake Jackson, or kind of mysterious and past-haunted like East and West Columbia and Brazoria, nor self-reliant and civic-minded like Sweeny, but just sort of a space where necessary county work occurs.
So this weekend my friend Wade Williams and I traveled to Brazoria to take in their own county historical museum — the mere fact they still have their own in the former county seat suggests resentment toward Angleton, as usually, these tend to be only in the current county seats — and the model train exhibit next door, which is a whole other story.
Anyway, the whole experience could not have been more different or better than the trip to Angleton.
The museum and model train layout are two components of the recycled 1930s-era public school complex, donated by the school district when they modernized some time back. (The chamber of commerce and the WIC office are two more; I forget the rest.)
This we were told by an ebullient 75-year-old lady who greeted us and insisted on shepherding us around some of the museum; it was in halls she knew well, as a student in this building long ago. She gave us a rounding — one room had lots of guns, another fossils, one was sort of a women’s history room, and their museum, she said, dripping with pride, was the only one in the county with a room devoted to African American history.
She mentioned there was a mock-up of Dr Herzog’s office, and then she took us to what she called the musuem’s “piece de resistance” — a series of three wooden sculptures depicting local Black history carved out of the very live oak tree under which the slaves of Brazoria County were read the Emancipation Proclamation.
I’ve lamented here on the lack of attention paid to Brazoria County Black history — because, after all, Brazoria County history is, by and large, Black history. Up until 1865 or later, the population was upwards of 70 percent Black, with many of those brought here illegally in chains direct from the Continent as late as 1840.
The wooden carvings alone tell you more of that story than the entire collection in Angleton, and you get still more detail in the African American section of the museum, including this collection of artifacts from the fascinating Mims community, one of the main landing points for the latecoming African slaves.
They didn’t stint on the uglier aspects of county history, either. Exhbit A, below:
“History is not always pretty, but you must always tell the facts completely and honestly,” reads the placard at top left. “If not, people might forget and allow some fool to forget and make the same mistake again.”
At top right:
“This KKK uniform was worn by a well-known rancher in our area. We will not divulge the family’s name, for obvious reasons.”
And there’s just cool stuff people have found, like this rad skull:
And of course, the mock-up of the office of Dr. Sofie Herzog, the Viennese immigrant pioneering doctor and trauma surgeon.
Key detail: around her neck she wears the necklace fashioned out of slugs she removed from men who’d been shot: she developed a touch-free method of taking the lead out: she suspended wounded patients over their bed and allowed gravity to do its work on the foreign object. Over the course of her career she removed a score or more of such slugs and kept each one for re-use as a charm on the necklace she wears in this picture. (Each of these shot men survived.) The details are accurate, if watered-down: her real stuffed alligator was not the baby you see here but a 13-footer, and in a ghoulish practice that was somewhat normal back then, she kept the deformed fetuses of stillborn babies in formaldehyde to ogle at with curious visitors.
I told our docent how impressed I was with their overall collection, and even mentioned Angleton. She kind of waved them away. “Yes,” she said. “This is a real museum, with real collections of real things. I don’t know what they call that thing up there.”
Whoa, the claws came out…
It’s all enough to make me wonder if it wouldn’t be wise for some Texas counties to have two or more seats. Move some of the functions of Matagorda’s out of Bay City and back to the more historic Matagorda. Likewise let Angleton remain Brazoria County’s administrative capital, but denote Brazoria as the “cultural capital” or historic capital, as Cusco is to Lima in Peru, or comparable to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Israel. Hell, maybe even lively up the moribund section of Houston once known as the proud town of Harrisburg with a local history museum; Houston has mistreated its Buffalo Bayou predecessor long enough.
So, if you come down this way, only go to Angleton if you’ve got a court date; come to Brazoria if you want to get to know the county.
Posted the description of Dr. Herzog's fashionable accessory on our ListServ and FB. She was also the first woman in the area to own a car and a telephone!
A late African American friend of mine once warned me Angleton was full of the KKK.