Everything Kingwood is known for
Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Kingwood.
Kingwood is known as the "Livable Forest," and for good reason. The towering loblolly pines that surround the neighborhoods give it a sense of peace that's hard to find so close to Houston. It’s a place where you might see families biking on the greenbelts one minute and a deer darting across the road the next. It was master-planned by Friendswood Development back in '71, and that careful planning shows. But there's more to Kingwood than just a pretty landscape.
In 2017, Kingwood faced a significant event with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which led to evacuations and severe flooding. The situation was exacerbated by the San Jacinto River Authority's decision to open floodgates, causing further inundation in the area.
Kingwood changed after Harvey. The storm hit in 2017, the same year the Astros won the World Series, a bittersweet memory. People still talk about the flooding, how it crept into homes nestled among the loblolly pines, how it displaced families who thought they were safe in this established community planned so carefully back in '71. It wasn't just the water; it was the feeling of vulnerability it left behind. The community spirit, always strong, became something even more resilient. Neighbors helped neighbors muck out houses, shared resources, and rebuilt. The high school football games, always a big draw, became a symbol of normalcy and healing. But the memory lingers. You see it in the way people talk about drainage, in the ongoing debates about development, and in the renewed appreciation for the green spaces, those 500 acres of parks and nature reserves that offer a sense of peace amid the worry. Harvey didn't break Kingwood, but it definitely reshaped it.
A pioneer oil boom town. Originated as crossroads community named for settler Pleasant Smith Humble (1835?-1912), who lived here before 1889, hewing his timber into railroad ties, mining gravel from his land, keeping store, and serving as justice of the peace. Neighbors included the Bender, Durdin, Isaacks, Lee, Slaughter, and Williams families. Economic bases were farms and sawmills. The post office opened 1902. In 1904 C. E. Barrett (1866-1926) drilled for oil in this area, securing small production on Moonshine Hill. On Jan. 7, 1905, he brought in the No. 2 Beaty Well which yielded 8,500 barrels a day, opening the great boom. From a village of 700, Humble grew at once into a town of 20,000. Field production-- the largest in Texas for the year 1905-- was 15,594,923 barrels of oil. The field was named for the town. A group of its operators, including Ross S. Sterling, later (1931-33) governor of Texas, in 1911 incorporated a new oil company named for the field, thus spreading into the annals of world commerce the town's name. Production from several strata here exceeded the total for fabulous Spindletop by 1946. Known as the greatest salt dome field, Humble still produces and the town for which it was named continued to thrive.
Humble field is an oil-producing area located 1.25 miles northeast of the town of Humble in northeastern Harris County on the Upper Gulf Coast of Texas. Named for its location, the field has drawn oil and negligible amounts of gas from an anhydrite and limestone reservoir in the caprock and on the flanks of a piercement salt dome in the Eocene, Miocene, Oligocene, and Pliocene formations at depths of 580 to 5,819 feet. Along with three other highly prolific piercement salt dome fields, Spindletop (1901), Sour Lake (1901), and Batson-Old (1903), Humble helped to establish the Texas oil industry when these fields produced the first Texas Gulf Coast oil. Field development was guided by both major and independent companies and centered on the caprock from 1905 through 1913, when flank production was begun. Through continued yields from deeper horizons on the flanks, Humble field was still producing as it approached its tenth decade and as its cumulative total neared 153 million barrels of oil by 1994. The area surrounding Humble field attracted oil prospectors who searched for another Spindletop discovery and who were encouraged by gas and sulphur found in water wells and by paraffin dirt found on the surface. In the fall of 1902 George Hart spudded a well in the field on evidence of escaping gas in the area. His operation was halted by a blowout, an unexpected volume of gas under pressure, that forced the drilling equipment out of the hole. Blowouts were encountered in several wells in the part of the field later called "the hill" and drilled in the summer of 1904 by C. E. Barrett of Houston. Despite the menace of blowouts, some success was found in the early field when Higgins Oil and Fuel Company brought in a large-volume gas well half a mile southeast of the Barrett wells in October 1904. By the end of the year Humble field reported two sporadically-producing oil wells that had yielded 2,000 barrels of oil. Since none of the crude had been sold, it was stored in earthen tanks for use in the field. Even though blowouts hampered field development, their threat was minimized by the invention of a blowout preventer, which was in use by 1905 when D. R. Beatty brought in the No. 2 Fee. The well came in on January 7, 1905, and gave up the first gusher production in the field with a potential of 8,500 barrels of oil per day from a depth of 1,012 feet. Other wells were sunk into the same shallow caprock, and some showed potentials of 10,000 barrels of oil per day. At the end of the first month of flush production Humble field reported a yield of 152,653 barrels of oil, and in February operators brought 495,847 barrels to the surface. On March 3, 1905, salt water began to appear in the wells. At the end of June, after six months of gusher production, the field peaked with a monthly figure of 2,798,162 barrels of oil and immediately began its decline. Because no Texas fields were prorated before 1930, no regulations prevented operators from overproducing the field, and the first annual yield was an astounding 15,594,310 barrels of oil. Excessive overproduction in the first year extracted a toll on the field by bringing salt-water encroachment in wells, by damaging the gas cap drive of the reservoir, and by forcing Humble field crude prices as low as $.16 per barrel when millions of barrels of new oil were dumped onto the market. From 1905 through 1913 development of the field concentrated on the caprock of the salt dome, producing at depths of 1,100 to 1,200 feet. By the end of 1906, with flush production waning, the field yielded less than 3.6 million barrels of oil, and by 1907 it gave up only 2.9 million barrels, most of which was shipped to refineries by railroad tank cars. From 1907 through 1913 field production averaged 2 million barrels of oil per year, and no deeper exploration was attempted. When deep production was found on the dome flanks at Sour Lake field, operators in Humble field drilled into zones below 2,500 feet, hoping
Humble is located on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad and U.S. Highway 59 eighteen miles northeast of Houston in northern Harris County, where the Big Thicket meets the coastal plain. The community serves as a retail and shipping center for an agricultural and lumbering section of the Cypress Creek valley at the center of the Humble oilfield , once the largest in Texas. Humble was a crossroads community in 1870, named for its founder, Pleasant S. Humble, a San Jacinto River ferry operator who arrived before the Civil War . Humble ran a commissary, cut railroad ties from local timber, and served as justice of the peace. Settlement in the area stopped during the Civil War but resumed after Reconstruction . In 1876 the town was a flag station on a railroad known as "the Rabbit" because passengers shot rabbits when the train stopped on the way from Houston to Shreveport. Residents pursued lumbering and agriculture, and by 1880 the population numbered ten Whites and fifty Blacks; the Blacks ran the lumbermill. Mill owner Charles Bender purchased the townsite, established a commissary where workers traded tokens for merchandise, and took over management in 1886. A post office opened that year, a school by 1887, and two hotels, two general stores, a sawmill, and a church by 1896. A local school established in 1890 had fifty pupils. In 1894 the railroad was taken over by the Houston, East and West Texas Railway. Humble became a boomtown in 1904, when oil was discovered nearby and the townsite was laid out. By the time the Lone Star Hotel was built and thirty wells were completed several months later, 10,000 people lived in the area, and by 1905 the Humble oilfield was the largest producing field in Texas. Numerous businesses were established over the next five years, including a bank, a theater, a dry-goods store, hotels, and in 1909 the Oil City News , which became the Harris County Sun in 1935. By 1906, however, production declined, the population fell to 7,500, and the community lost its original town government. Ross S. Sterling operated a feed store at Humble before he entered the oil business and founded Humble Oil and Refining Company (now Exxon Company, U.S.A. ) in 1911, but moved his headquarters to Houston in 1912. By 1914 only 3,000 residents were reported in Humble, but a second boom that year and a partial boom in 1929, when the population reached 4,000, spurred municipal development. During World War I members of the Nineteenth Infantry from Fort Sam Houston operated an army training camp at Moonshine Hill. Local residents did not immediately feel the effects of the Great Depression , but the population eventually declined to 1,500, and many farmers returned to truck farming and dairying. After defeating a proposal to incorporate in 1929, a new city charter was obtained on August 28, 1933, and the town incorporated. Oil production in World War II brought an influx of workers that increased the population from 1,371 in 1940 to 2,600 by the 1960s. The Eastex Freeway (U.S. Highway 59) from Houston to Humble was completed by 1970, when efforts to restore the downtown area were made, and a library, a city hall, a community hall, a park, and a historical museum were completed or under construction. Proximity to Houston Intercontinental Airport and Lake Houston attracted new residents to Humble and gave rise to fourteen new subdivisions and other summer-home construction. Workers commuted to Houston or were employed at Utex Industries, a metal manufacturer, which operated nearby. In 1990 the population was 12,060. In the 1990s Old Humble, east of the railroad tracks and south of Farm Road 1960, was populated by artists and antique dealers. By 2000 the population reached 14,579.
Early reports of natural gas seepages in this area were not uncommon in the late 19th century. James Slaughter noticed such natural occurences near the San Jacinto River in 1887. Several years later, with S. A. Hart, he set up a drilling operation in the area, but it proved unsuccessful. Charles Barrett, a former Huston merchant, also drilled wells here, but found the results limited. In 1904, the Higgins Oil Company brought in a major gas well and the following year, the first successful oil well was drilled. This area, known as the Moonshine Hill section of the great Humble oil field, became the site of a boom town. Within months of the 1905 discovery, the population of the Moonshine Hill settlement increased to 10,000. Early operations associated with the site included the Moonshine Oil Company of Walter Sharp, Ed Prather, and Howard R. Hughes. Although tents comprised most of the early structures, Moonshine Hill eventually included a church, school, postal station, stores, hotels, and saloons. Despite three separate boom eras, the last occurring in 1929, Moonshine Hill declined as a community. Its brief existence, however, had a dramatic impact on the economic development of Humble and Houston. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986
Robert Buckner Morris, entrepreneur, securities broker, oil executive, and collector of customs at the port of Galveston, was born in Houston on December 9, 1861, to prominent parents Joseph Robert Morris and Hannah Cordelia (Buckner) Morris. He had seven siblings, but two sisters died very young. Morris's ties to Texas began in 1833 when his maternal grandfather, Benjamin P. Buckner of Kentucky, arrived on Galveston Island. Buckner owned a line of steamers that operated between New Orleans and Mississippi ports, and these vessels carried supplies to the revolutionary army during the fight for Texas independence. Buckner later moved to what is now Houston and served as chief justice of Harris County and then became the first elected mayor of Houston after Texas became a state. Morris's father, Joseph Robert Morris, was an early civic leader of Houston and became mayor from 1868 to 1869. Robert B. Morris attended primary school in Houston and then attended Russell Military Academy in New Haven, Connecticut. He briefly attended Yale University before returning to Houston to help his father rebuild his business after a disastrous fire in 1878. Upon the death of his father in 1885, Morris continued to operate his father's hardware store for another fifteen years until an economic panic forced him to close the business. With only $58, Morris moved to Quanah, Texas, and soon opened a movie film service business supplying the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma. When Morris returned to Houston a few years later, he owned every movie theater in Quanah, Vernon, Childress, Wichita Falls, and Henrietta, Texas. Upon his return to Houston, Morris entered into a securities business and became interested in the Humble oilfield located north of Houston in Humble, Texas. For twenty-one years, he devoted a large part of his energy to locating crude oil in the Humble salt dome. The Galveston Daily News reported in 1929 that with "the perseverance of several ordinary men," Morris searched for oil in the Humble salt dome. His friends "kidded" him about his search and often referred to his property as "Morris' salt water pond." Eventually, Morris persuaded Hugh Roy Cullen and James Marion West to lease 100 acres near the salt dome where they sank a 5,200-foot well. They struck oil on January 2, 1929. The royalties paid to Morris from this venture made it possible for him to accumulate a sizable fortune making him one of the wealthiest men in Houston. Morris was appointed collector of customs at Galveston by President Herbert Hoover and confirmed by the United States Senate on May 9, 1930. At the time of his appointment, Morris was the highest paid collector of customs in Texas and had a salary of $5,600 per year. He served in this position until 1934 when his term expired. Morris married Mary James Traylor in Victoria, Texas, on June 8, 1892. They had two children, Robert Jr. and Margaret. According to his biographical sketch in the Standard Blue Book of Texas , he married Ella Mitchell in October 1910. He then married Mary Elizabeth Hecker Rencher in San Antonio on October 14, 1922. Morris was an organizer of the Planters and Mechanics National Bank in Houston and served as its first vice president. He was a member of the Republican party and served as the Harris County chairman of the party. Morris was a Mason and a charter member of the Holland Lodge No. 1 AF&AM and a member and president general (1934-36) of the Sons of the Republic of Texas . He received the organization's honorary knighthood in the Knights of the Order of San Jacinto . Robert Buckner Morris died at the age of seventy-five in Houston on December 7, 1937. He was buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas.
An oil well drilled at this site in 1912 yielded not oil, but free-flowing artesian water. The following year, German native Nick Lambrecht (1855-1920) purchased the property. Lambrecht served as justice of the peace and mayor during Humble's oil boom days in the early 20th century and in 1904 had installed a water system to meet the needs of the many oil field workers who came to town. Lambrecht's artesian well was used to supply water to bathhouses and was also piped to nearby homes. In earlier years, water had been hauled to town in barrels on horse-drawn wagons. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Ninfa Laurenzo was a widow with five kids when she opened a little restaurant in her late husbands failing tortilla factory on Navigation Boulevard in 1973.…
The last surviving WWI-era dreadnought. Fought at D-Day and Iwo Jima.
Taller than the Washington Monument. Where Texas won independence in 18 minutes.
On April 21 1836 Sam Houston and nine hundred Texans caught Santa Annas army napping at San Jacinto and won Texas independence in eighteen minutes. Six hundred…
A house covered in 50000 flattened beer cans. 18 years of drinking and decorating.
World-class art museum that's completely free. Rothko Chapel next door.
Tomball cafe on State Highway 249, north of Houston. Ella Goodson took over the place in 1954, and the chicken-fried steak here has been called the best in…
An oak tree in the Garden Oaks neighborhood where passersby report seeing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the bark and leave flowers and religious…
Most recent: 2025 6A Division 2
Kingwood High School, a Class 6A powerhouse in Kingwood, Texas, has established a strong tradition in baseball. The Mustangs proudly claimed the 6A Division 2 State Championship in 2025, showcasing their consistent excellence on the diamond. This achievement reflects the dedication and talent fostered within the program, making Kingwood a respected name in Texas high school sports.
The school's baseball legacy extends to producing top-tier talent, with notable alumnus Masyn Winn having advanced to professional and major-college play. This success story underscores Kingwood High School's commitment to developing athletes who can compete at the highest levels, bringing pride to their hometown and inspiring future generations of Mustangs.
The 2025 6A Division 2 State Championship marked a high point for Kingwood High School baseball.
Most recent: 2018 5A
Kingwood Park High School, a familiar name in Texas Class 5A volleyball, holds a distinguished spot in the state's athletic records. The Panthers proudly claimed a UIL State Championship title in 2018, marking a significant achievement for the Kingwood community.
The school's volleyball program continues to be a point of pride, reflecting the dedication and spirit found in the local athletic scene. While no alumni from Kingwood Park High School volleyball are currently listed as having gone pro or to major colleges, the 2018 state title remains a highlight for the program and its supporters.
The 2018 5A UIL State Championship represents a pinnacle for Kingwood Park High School volleyball.
Most recent: 2025 6A Division 2
Kingwood High School, nestled in the piney woods of Kingwood, Texas, holds a distinguished place in Class 6A softball. The Mustangs have one state championship to their name, a notable achievement in the highly competitive University Interscholastic League. This success reflects consistent effort and a strong program.
The community takes pride in its high school sports, and the softball team's accomplishment is a highlight. While no alumni are listed as having gone pro or to major colleges from this program, the team's state title speaks volumes about the quality of play fostered in Kingwood.
The Kingwood High School softball team secured the 6A Division 2 state championship in 2025.
589 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.
Kingwood is known as the "Livable Forest," and for good reason. The towering loblolly pines that surround the neighborhoods give it a sense of peace that's hard to find so close to Houston. It’s a place where you might…
There's a brewery in Porter that took over a house of worship and leaned all the way into it. Back Pew Brewing opened in March 2016 at 26452 Sorters McClellan Road, inside an old church building, and it built its whole…
Here is a road whose name fools almost everyone: the "1960" in FM 1960 is not a year. It is a Farm-to-Market route number. The Texas Highway Department designated FM 1960 on May 23, 1951, under Minute Order 030242,…
Two miles east of downtown Humble was one of the wildest boomtowns in Texas. Gas seepages were noticed as early as 1887; Houston retailer Charles F. Barrett leased Moonshine Hill in 1903 and struck oil in May 1904.…
An oil well drilled at this site in 1912 yielded not oil, but free-flowing artesian water. The following year, German native Nick Lambrecht (1855-1920) purchased the property. Lambrecht served as justice of the peace…
On a December night in nineteen-twenty-two, around ten o'clock, the Houston East and West Texas passenger train — the line everybody called 'the Rabbit' — came into Humble and sideswiped a switch engine sitting on the…
Locals know this one by two names — Williams Bayou on the maps, Williams Gully if you grew up nearby. It rises about three miles east of Humble and runs southwest for roughly four and a half miles before joining Garners…
First things first: it is pronounced Umble, silent H, because that is how Pleasant Smith Humble said his own name. Plez Humble ran a ferry across the San Jacinto River, cut railroad ties, kept a store, and settled small…
One of the largest corporations on earth is named after downtown Humble. Ross S. Sterling ran a feed store here during the oil boom before moving into oil itself. Humble Oil Company was chartered in February 1911 with…
Imagine this spot in 1904. It wasn't a city; it was a quiet lumber and farming community. C. E. Barrett drilled here that summer and got blowouts instead of a well. Then, on January 7, 1905, D. R. Beatty's No. 2 Fee…
The oil boom of 1904 brought chaos and wildcatters, but it also brought entrepreneurs with a vision. In 1911, a group of them, including brothers Ross and Frank Sterling and their partner Walter Fondren, decided to…
The West Fork of the San Jacinto River usually flows peacefully by, a scenic backdrop to the city. But in August 2017, it became a force of destruction. When Hurricane Harvey stalled over the Houston area, it dumped an…
A pioneer oil boom town. Originated as crossroads community named for settler Pleasant Smith Humble (1835?-1912), who lived here before 1889, hewing his timber into railroad ties, mining gravel from his land, keeping…
Christian Life Center Academy in Humble, Texas is where DeAndre Jordan had a dominant senior season — about 26 points, 15 rebounds, and 8 blocks a game, once swatting 20 shots in a single game. He played one year at…
Early reports of natural gas seepages in this area were not uncommon in the late 19th century. James Slaughter noticed such natural occurences near the San Jacinto River in 1887. Several years later, with S. A. Hart, he…
Before oil, Humble was a lumber town, and the lumber was Charles Bender's. A German immigrant apprenticed to be a banker, Bender sailed to America at 15, worked banking in New York, ran bakeries in Missouri, and lost…
You're in downtown Humble, home of Good Oil Days, the Main Street festival that celebrates the oil boom that built this town. When oil gushed in here in 1905, Humble briefly out-produced every field in Texas, and the…
You're driving through Humble, Texas, a town that owes some of its early civic spirit to a group of Masons. Back around the turn of the century, local Masons had to travel to neighboring towns for their meetings. That…
Humble City Cafe occupies the Pangburn Building, built in 1914 on Main Street while Humble was still riding its oilfield economy. Building owner Tom Ott has held the Pangburn Building since December 1970 and opened the…
The kid who grew up in Porter took the least likely road to orbit there is. Robert Crippen was born in Beaumont in 1937 and raised here, went to New Caney High School, and took an aerospace engineering degree at the…
The town you're rolling through almost had a different name, and a longer one. When settlers in this corner of southeast Montgomery County asked for a post office in 1892, one of the men who'd put down roots here was…
Porter raised a singer with soul in his blood. Jason Head, who performs as Sundance Head, was born here in Porter, and his last name is no accident in Texas music: his father was Roy Head, the blue-eyed-soul singer who…
In late August 2017, the same rivers that make this area green turned on it. Hurricane Harvey stalled over Southeast Texas and dumped historic rain, and Porter sat in one of the worst spots for it, low ground near the…
Before the Deanna Ogg case was solved, it produced one of the most cited wrongful convictions in Texas. Roy Criner, a logger working in this part of Montgomery County, was convicted in 1990 of aggravated sexual assault…
Porter has been swallowed, and the numbers show how fast. Around 1914 this was a settlement of roughly a hundred and fifty people with two general stores and a lumber company. By 1940 it had gotten smaller, not bigger:…
A little after noon on December 28, 2024, a tornado dropped out of a December storm system and went to work on this area. It stayed on the ground roughly ten and a half miles, tracking from the Porter Heights area…
For a town this size, Porter's roster is absurd. Robert Crippen grew up here and went on to pilot Columbia on the first Space Shuttle flight in 1981, then commanded three more missions and ran Kennedy Space Center. That…
Cypress Creek is the big one up north — about 49 miles of water curving northeast from Waller County across the top of Harris County to join Spring Creek near Humble. It was almost certainly named for the bald cypress…
The department that covers this ground started in February of 1962 as a volunteer outfit, and there is a photograph from that year of the whole thing: nine men standing in front of their fire truck. That was the fire…
On October 11, 2024, somebody in Porter shot a bald eagle out of a tree, and the thing that made the case was video. Investigators had footage of the bird being hit and tumbling down, and when they went looking they…
The luckiest thing about the Porter store collapse is who happened to be driving by. A little after eleven in the morning on July 22, 2026, the front facade of a gas station and convenience store at FM 1314 and Lazy…
Porter's best-known singer nearly lost it all to a holster. Sundance Head, who won the eleventh season of The Voice and grew up around here as the son of soul singer Roy Head, was putting a pistol away at his ranch in…
If you want one measure of whether a Texas suburb has truly arrived, it is whether H-E-B has decided you are worth a store. This area is about to find out. The grocer is building H-E-B Valley Ranch on North Grand…
The reason a town grew here at all was a famously rickety little railroad. The Houston, East and West Texas Railway, chartered in 1875, pushed a narrow-gauge line northeast out of Houston, had twenty miles of track down…
If you want barbecue right in the middle of everyday Porter, The Pit BBQ at 22776 FM 1314 is parked exactly where the town actually moves, across the road from Porter High School. It's a family-run smokehouse on the…
Here in Porter, Texas, the land tells a story older than any of us. We're part of the Gulf Coastal Plain, which means we're built on layers of sediment washed down over millennia. Think sand and clay, the kind of stuff…
On May 7, 2026, a man was found dead alongside U.S. 59 in this corridor, and the first question was whether anyone would ever know what happened to him. Splendora police called in Montgomery County sheriff's detectives…
You're driving through Humble, a town that exploded with oil in the early 1900s. Right around 1907, when the oil boom was in full swing, a preacher named J. T. Browning started holding Methodist services here. Can you…
You're in Kingwood, the 'Livable Forest,' a master-planned community in northeast Houston founded in 1970, with its first residential village opening in 1971. It was a joint venture between two Texas giants: Friendswood…
You're driving past what's believed to be the oldest cemetery in Humble. The earliest marked grave here belongs to Joseph Dunman, who died way back in 1879. And listen to this: Jane Elizabeth Humble, wife of the town's…
Humble Westfield Road is another northeast Harris County destination road, its name a straight line drawn between its two endpoints. It tied the oil town of Humble to the railroad community of Westfield to the west.…
Humble field is an oil-producing area located 1.25 miles northeast of the town of Humble in northeastern Harris County on the Upper Gulf Coast of Texas. Named for its location, the field has drawn oil and negligible…
Humble is located on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad and U.S. Highway 59 eighteen miles northeast of Houston in northern Harris County, where the Big Thicket meets the coastal plain. The community serves as a retail…
Robert Buckner Morris, entrepreneur, securities broker, oil executive, and collector of customs at the port of Galveston, was born in Houston on December 9, 1861, to prominent parents Joseph Robert Morris and Hannah…
Will Clayton Parkway, the busy approach on the east side of George Bush Intercontinental Airport, honors William Lockhart Clayton (1880 to 1966). In 1904 Clayton went into the cotton business with his brother-in-law…
This quiet brown river east of Houston punches way above its weight in history. The main stem is short, only about 28 miles from the dam below Lake Houston down to Galveston Bay, but down near its mouth, on April 21,…
Locals know this one by two names — Williams Bayou on the maps, Williams Gully if you grew up nearby. It rises about three miles east of Humble and runs southwest for roughly four and a half miles before joining Garners…
Atascocita wears one of the oldest names in Harris County, and it is Spanish for getting stuck. Back in the 1750s, Spain cut a military road from San Antonio toward Louisiana, and it passed an outpost called Atascosito,…
You're driving past the Seal McDougle Cemetery, established in 1883. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005.
Atascocita is named for a road, and the road is older than the United States. The Atascosito Road was established by the Spanish before 1757 as a military highway into East Texas, taking its name from Atascosito, a…
Old Humble Road carries the name of the town it runs to, and that town carries the name of a man. Humble grew up around a San Jacinto River crossing run by Pleasant Smith Humble, known as Plez, who reached the area…
The West Fork of the San Jacinto River is the long arm of the system — ninety miles of water sliding southeast out of the Walker County woods near Huntsville down to the northern rim of Lake Houston, where it meets the…
The name on every sign around here is a Spanish joke about bad roads. Atascocita traces back to the Spanish word atascadero, which means a bog or mire, the kind of soft, sucking ground where a cart sinks to its axles.…
Drive far enough east in Atascocita and the suburb runs straight into open water. That is Lake Houston, the broad reservoir the City of Houston created in 1953 by damming the San Jacinto River, with the lake filling…
The neighborhoods spreading out around you are almost all younger than the people living in them. For most of the twentieth century this was rural land that the Humble Oil and Refining Company held for oil and gas,…
Here is a fact that surprises new arrivals scrolling through lakefront listings: the same Lake Houston that anchors Atascocita's marinas and back patios is genuine alligator country. American alligators live throughout…
If you want to eat something with actual Atascocita roots, point the car toward That One Place at 3333 Atascocita Road. It started small, opening in 2012 as a roadside Nola-style sno ball stand selling shaved-ice snow…
You're cruising through New Caney, Texas, a town with roots stretching back to the 1860s. It started as Presswood, named for a pioneer family who settled here in 1862, raising cattle on the open range. Then came the…
If you want a single physical spot that sums up everything about this town, pull over at the New Caney historical marker at 21130 U.S. 59. In a few paragraphs of cast metal, it lays out the arc of the place: the…
You're in Atascocita, where the golf course is older than the suburb around it. In 1957, a syndicate of Houston businessmen including landowners W.M. Wheless and J.S. Abercrombie opened the Atascocita Country Club on…
Atascocita High School only opened in August 2006, but it built a football program fast enough to start feeding the pros within a generation. The breakthrough name is Sam Cosmi, an offensive lineman who starred for the…
Locals know this one by two names — Williams Bayou on the maps, Williams Gully if you grew up nearby. It rises about three miles east of Humble and runs southwest for roughly four and a half miles before joining Garners…
Jetero Boulevard is a short surviving stub deep in the cargo zone of George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and the name is a leftover from one of the strangest chapters in Houston aviation history. In 1957, before there…
The East Fork of the San Jacinto River runs sixty-nine miles southeast out of the piney woods near Dodge, in Walker County, down to Lake Houston, where it meets the West Fork. The San Jacinto name honors Saint Hyacinth,…
Eighteen miles northeast of downtown, the San Jacinto River fans out into the broad sheet of water that quenches a big chunk of Houston's thirst. The city itself built this one: crews broke ground in late 1951, finished…
Few small Texas communities can say a local kid piloted humanity's first reusable spacecraft, but New Caney can. Astronaut Robert L. Crippen grew up in the Porter–New Caney area and graduated from New Caney High School…
This area carries one of the most consequential forensic stories in Texas, and it should be told carefully. On September 27, 1986, 16-year-old Deanna Ogg, a New Caney High School student, disappeared after being seen…
For a district out in the piney woods, New Caney High School has an absurd alumni list. Robert Crippen came up here and went on to pilot Columbia on the first Space Shuttle flight in 1981, then commanded three more…
Adam Dunn left New Caney High School as a quarterback, and for a while that looked like the plan. He went to Texas to play football, redshirted, and opened a season listed third on the depth chart. Then he ran into the…
The stretch of road you're on belongs to a community that has worn three different names. Permanent settlement began during the Civil War era when Austin and Sarah Waters Presswood arrived in 1862, and the place was…
When the railroad arrived, it turned this little place into a timber-shipping point, and the scale is surprising. By 1884 the community counted only about 60 residents, yet it supported four steam sawmills along with a…
Inside Lake Houston Wilderness Park, you can literally walk the remnants of New Caney's timber era. Temporary rail lines once threaded through what was then working forestland, hauling cut logs out to the mills, and…
New Caney's school district once landed in a federal courtroom over a string of rosary beads. In the case known as Chalifoux v. New Caney Independent School District, students challenged a school policy that treated…
Each year the grounds at Bull Sallas Park fill up for one of East Montgomery County's most durable traditions, the East Montgomery County Fair and Rodeo. Established in 1985, it brings together livestock exhibitions,…
Before New Caney's own Robert Crippen could pilot the first Space Shuttle, he had to train for a machine that came home as a heavy, unpowered glider. Because Columbia couldn't fire its engines and circle around for a…
Near where U.S. 59 meets Loop 494 and Reinhardt Road sits the Reinhardt Homestead, a place that shows what came after the sawmills moved on. Conrad Reinhardt bought the property in 1918, and the bungalow-style house…
Tucked into the New Caney area is Vick Cemetery, a historic burial ground holding more than 170 known graves, with documented burials reaching all the way back to 1867. That date is no accident: it places the cemetery's…
Along the Loop 494 corridor where Porter, New Caney, and Kingwood blur together, Pete's Burger Place has been flipping patties since 2005. It's family-owned and independent, the kind of traditional burger stand that…
For a bite that sits squarely inside New Caney proper rather than out in the blended Loop 494 corridor, Fat Boy's Restaurant at 22598 Community Drive is the local call. It's an independent breakfast-and-lunch diner, the…
New Caney, Texas, sits right in the heart of Montgomery County, and for generations, this area's been synonymous with timber. The East Texas Piney Woods stretch right through here, and the land's always been ideal for…
Cypress Creek is the big one up north — about 49 miles of water curving northeast from Waller County across the top of Harris County to join Spring Creek near Humble. It was almost certainly named for the bald cypress…
Verna Lee Hightower, rodeo competitor, the first African American to become an official member of the Girl's Rodeo Association, and civil rights activist, was born on June 26, 1930, in Spring, Texas, near Houston, to…
Luce Bayou carries one of the more haunting names on the map: the Handbook of Texas says it was named for a runaway slave — no name recorded, no story preserved, just the bayou keeping the memory of someone who ran for…
You're driving north of Houston, right through Spring. This community started in 1838 when William Pierpont set up a trading post on Spring Creek. By 1840, it was a small farming town, but things really took off in 1871…
Farm to Market Road 1314 forms the northeastern boundary of Porter Heights and connects the community to the Grand Parkway, the outermost beltway around Houston. This road is a key transportation artery for the area.
You're driving past the Reinhardt Homestead, established in 1918 by Conrad Reinhardt. He and his wife Lillie Bell raised their family right here, living on the property until their deaths. The house you see, built…
Greens Bayou is one of those Houston waterways whose namesake got lost to history — somewhere in the 1820s an early settler named Green left his name on it, but nobody wrote down who he was. What we do know is the…
You're rolling through Sheldon, on the northeast edge of Houston, near C. E. King High School. C. E. King just put a sophomore on the national track map. His name is Dillon Mitchell. At the U. I. L. six A state…
Nimitz High School (2005 W. W. Thorne Dr., Houston, TX, Aldine ISD) is where Brittney Griner rewrote the girls' basketball record books. As a senior she dunked 52 times in 32 games — including seven in a single game —…
Grand Oaks (Spring, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Owen Eastwood (0.469 avg); Andrew Clayton (4 HR).
Huffman-Cleveland Road is a county-maintained link in northeastern Harris County, and its name is really the names of two men. The southern end sits in Huffman, the community first settled in 1839 by David Huffman, a…
Greens Bayou is one of those Houston waterways whose namesake got lost to history — somewhere in the 1820s an early settler named Green left his name on it, but nobody wrote down who he was. What we do know is the…
The deep forest all around you in Woodbranch is not an accident, and it is not a coincidence either — the trees are where the name came from. In the 1960s developers laid out a residential subdivision in these woods…
Huffman-Hargrave is picked fourth in District nine, four-A Division One — the last playoff spot, with Vidor pushing hard for it. Vidor brings a lot back, and the preview asks straight out whether it is enough to get…
Every town has its heroes, but you won't find any household names connected to Woodbranch. As a small, relatively young residential community founded in the 1960s, it hasn't been the hometown of any major celebrities,…
You're driving past the historic Spring Cemetery, a quiet reminder of this town's past. Spring boomed in 1873 as a vital railroad center on the International and Great Northern line. Early landowners, the Sellers…
Huffman, Texas, isn't quite like its neighbors. It's never been a major agricultural hub like Crosby, despite the fertile soil along the San Jacinto River. And unlike Humble, it didn't explode with the oil boom, though…
The East Fork of the San Jacinto River runs sixty-nine miles southeast out of the piney woods near Dodge, in Walker County, down to Lake Houston, where it meets the West Fork. The San Jacinto name honors Saint Hyacinth,…
Old Town Spring, north of Houston, was a roaring railroad town in the early nineteen-hundreds — the International-Great Northern made it a junction with a roundhouse and a fourteen-track switchyard, drawing some two…
A natural spring forms where groundwater reaches the land surface and discharges on its own. Rain infiltrates soil and rock, fills an aquifer, and moves from higher hydraulic pressure toward an opening such as a valley,…
Spring Creek drains a watershed stretching across parts of Grimes, Waller, Montgomery, and Harris counties. Near the eastern end of its course, the creek joins the West Fork of the San Jacinto River. That water…
Floodplains tempt settlement for the same reasons they create danger. They are flat, often fertile, close to water, and easier to travel across than uplands. Along Spring Creek, undeveloped floodplain also supports…
Rainfall supports creeks in two ways. Storm runoff reaches channels quickly, while some water soaks downward and recharges aquifers. Groundwater can return gradually through springs and seepage, sustaining flow between…
Spring Creek briefly lent its name to an entire county of the Republic of Texas. Lawmakers established Spring Creek County for judicial and other purposes on January twenty first, eighteen forty one. It covered pieces…
Spring has more than one name story. The community clearly developed near Spring Creek, making the creek an obvious source. Another often-repeated tradition says railroad workers reached the area during a beautiful…
Spring, Texas, might seem like just another suburb north of Houston, but it's got a pulse all its own, and a surprising number of folks who've gone on to do big things. You might not know that Simone Biles, the most…
Before Spring was a suburb it was a produce town, and the museum's record puts a date on the start of it. In eighteen ninety nine, working with the railroad, the station agent R. L. Robinson shipped the first boxcar…
Spring, creek, stream, bayou, and river describe related but different things. A spring is groundwater emerging at the surface. Creek and stream are flexible names for flowing channels, usually smaller than what locals…
Creeks pulled early settlement toward them because they concentrated necessities in one corridor. Water served people and livestock. Bottomland supplied timber, game, fish, and fertile soil. A dependable crossing…
Southeastern Texas creeks often look muddy and move slowly because they cross a young, flat coastal plain rather than steep, rocky country. The low gradient reduces the speed that would otherwise expose bedrock and…
Towns that come back usually come back because somebody wrote a plan. The local account of how this district came back is better than that. By the fifties and sixties the old commercial strip here was in trouble.…
Here is a fact about Spring in the nineteen thirties that does not fit the picture you would build from everything else. The Handbook of Texas lists among the town's noted businesses of that era the A. F. Russell Day…
Spring supported a run of sawmills and lumber businesses, and one of them made something stranger than lumber. Bayer's Excelsior Mill opened in nineteen twenty seven. Excelsior is a product almost nobody names anymore…
Spring took its name from Spring Creek, where William Pierpont set up a trading post in 1838; German immigrant farmers, including Carl Wunsche, arrived in the mid-1840s, growing sugar cane and cotton. The Houston and…
Creek-bottom land offered early settlers moisture, fertile alluvium, timber, and access to routes through the woods. German families and other farmers around Spring used that landscape for farms, livestock, and…
You're driving through Spring, and right here is a building that's seen it all. Constructed in 1902 by the Wunsche family, German immigrants who arrived in Texas back in 1846, this place was built to serve the railroad…
For over three decades from 1987, the Texas Crawfish & Music Festival took over Preservation Park in Old Town Spring each April-May, benefiting the Spring Preservation League, the nonprofit dedicated to preserving the…
The brick building at Midway and Gentry in Old Town Spring was the Spring State Bank, chartered May 19, 1910 (the first building burned in 1917). It really was robbed twice. May 24, 1932: two men pulled guns on…
Built in 1902 by brothers Charlie and Dell Wunsche, grandsons of Carl Wunsche, one of the German immigrant farmers who settled the Spring area in the mid-1840s, the Wunsche Bros. Saloon and Hotel lodged and watered the…
Old Town Spring, Texas, on the block where the Wunsche Bros. Cafe building still stands -- the Wunsche family was among the first to settle Spring. During World War I, three Wunsche brothers served. William Wunsche…
Old Town Spring did not grow the way a town usually grows, one family at a time. Most of it traces back to a single railroad employee. R. L. Robinson was the station agent here, which in a railroad town is already a…
Spring had a semiprofessional baseball club, and the field was on Main Street. The local record has Robinson and his wife providing the ground for it, which fits everything else about the man. If you want to understand…
Dekaney (Houston, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Michael Hayes (4 HR).
You're driving past the Schlobohm Cemetery, a resting place for a Texas Revolution veteran. Johann Schlobohm arrived in Texas by 1836, enlisting in the Zavalla Guards. His unit arrived in Galveston just before the…
In August 2017, Roman Forest became a case study in hydrology. When Hurricane Harvey stalled over Southeast Texas, it wasn't the wind that posed the main threat here, but the water. The storm dropped thirty to forty…
On the twenty third of February, nineteen fifty three, fire took Immanuel Church and its parish hall. Not damaged. Destroyed, the whole campus of it, in a congregation that had been German speaking since it was founded…
As you navigate Roman Forest, you might feel like you need a history book instead of a GPS. You'll pass Parthenon Place, Colosseum Court, Caesars Circle and Appian Way, and out on Roman Forest Boulevard there are actual…
You're driving through Spring, a town that boomed thanks to the railroad. Platted in 1873 by the Houston & Great Northern Railroad, Spring quickly became a commercial hub, drawing German settlers and fueling a lumber…
You're driving through Spring, and right here is Immanuel United Church of Christ, established back in 1913 as a German congregation. They built their first church by 1916, but a devastating fire in 1953 destroyed the…
Spring (Spring, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Julian Curry (4 HR).
From 1969 to 1992, Goodyear based a blimp operation on a 40-acre triangle along I-45 at Spring, the southeastern counterpart to its Carson, California base. The resident airship was the GZ20A 'America,' top speed about…
Here is the twist: the city is named for its forest, not for Rome, yet the developers leaned into the accidental pun anyway. Drivers turning off Interstate 69 onto Roman Forest Boulevard pass tall, Roman-style pillars…
Roman Forest sits in far eastern Montgomery County, roughly 32 miles northeast of Houston and 23 miles southeast of Conroe, tucked east of U.S. 59 and near the East Fork of the San Jacinto River. It began the way many…
Gum Gully is a five-mile stream on the northeast side, rising a couple miles east of Lake Houston and running south to Jackson Bayou near a spot called Tank Lake. The name comes straight from the woods it drains — the…
If you are driving along a road called Aldine Mail Route, you are following the literal path of a 19th-century mail carrier. When Aldine got its own post office in 1896, the surrounding farm families were too scattered…
Imagine your town going under. For the people of Patton Village, it's a living memory. In August 2017 Hurricane Harvey stalled over Southeast Texas, and out here -- where Peach Creek runs down toward the East Fork of…
You're in Aldine, which began as a stop called Prairie Switch on the International-Great Northern Railroad, whose tracks came through in 1873; the Aldine post office followed in 1896. Around the turn of the century,…
Eighteen miles northeast of downtown, the San Jacinto River fans out into the broad sheet of water that quenches a big chunk of Houston's thirst. The city itself built this one: crews broke ground in late 1951, finished…
For a long time, if you mentioned Patton Village to an outsider, they'd give you two words: speed trap. This small town built a big reputation on aggressive enforcement along U.S. 59, and the numbers were not subtle --…
You're in Dyersdale, a small community on FM 527 and the old Missouri Pacific line (formerly the Beaumont, Sour Lake and Western Railway) about six miles northeast of Houston in northeastern Harris County, Texas. It is…
You're driving past Aldine, Texas, a place that once bloomed with figs and oranges. The railroad rolled in back in 1873, bringing settlers, many of Swedish descent, to this fertile land. They cultivated Satsuma oranges,…
In 1971 Patton Village annexed a strip of U.S. Highway 59, the busy Eastex Freeway now signed as Interstate 69, and turned traffic enforcement into a business. It deployed unmarked cars and radar, and at its peak the…
Patton Village wears its founder's name for a reason. H.L. "Pat" Patton was born in Splendora, just south of here, and from about 1931 to 1950 he was one of the country's top oil-well blowout and fire specialists, the…
MacArthur (Houston, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Artemio Mata (0.455 avg, 4 HR).
Spring-Cypress Road links two old place names: the railroad town of Spring, which grew up around Spring Creek and the rail lines, and the Big Cypress farming community on Cypress Creek to the west. There was never a…
Before he built this town, H.L. Patton solved one of the hardest problems in early oil work: how to cap a well spewing gas and oil under enormous pressure, often on fire. His signature answer was a device he called the…
You're in Huffman, one of the oldest communities in northeast Harris County. Its founder, Louisiana native David Huffman, fought in the Texas Revolution, and in 1838 the young Republic paid him twenty-four dollars and…
Just east of Roman Forest runs the East Fork of the San Jacinto River, and a key hydrology fact shapes life here: unlike the West Fork, which is buffered by Lake Conroe, the East Fork has no dam. The San Jacinto River…
Eighteen miles northeast of downtown, the San Jacinto River fans out into the broad sheet of water that quenches a big chunk of Houston's thirst. The city itself built this one: crews broke ground in late 1951, finished…
This quiet brown river east of Houston punches way above its weight in history. The main stem is short, only about 28 miles from the dam below Lake Houston down to Galveston Bay, but down near its mouth, on April 21,…
Houston is home to the National Museum of Funeral History, billed as the largest collection of funeral-service artifacts in the country. Star artifact: a 1916 Packard funeral bus built to carry the coffin, the…
The name on the signs around you has been changed twice. This patch of north Houston prairie was first just called Greens, after the bayou that drains it. Then in 1873 the International and Great Northern Railroad…
Eighteen miles northeast of downtown, the San Jacinto River fans out into the broad sheet of water that quenches a big chunk of Houston's thirst. The city itself built this one: crews broke ground in late 1951, finished…
Aldine never incorporated as a city. It has no mayor, no city hall, no downtown of its own, which makes the thing that actually binds the community together a little surprising: a school district. On May 4, 1935, voters…
Out where the rails crossed this lonely prairie in 1876, the trains brought two grim little dramas within a few months of each other. That May, a Galveston newspaper reported the burial of a man it could only guess was…
The very name Prairie Switch is a piece of engineering history standing on the prairie. A Victorian steam locomotive was a thirsty, hungry machine: it burned coal to boil water, and it turned that water into steam fast,…
Here's a true Aldine mystery. Around two-thousand-one, a man walked into the Northeast News office out on Aldine Mail Route Road carrying a hundred-pound marble headstone — German inscription, a pair of clasped hands…
Westfield (Houston, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Enzo Jones (0.448 avg).
Charles and Bertha Haude were an unusual pair of Texas farmers. As Klein family history tells it, Charles had been a doctor in Prussia and spoke four languages, earning extra money as a translator, while Bertha had…
Luce Bayou carries one of the more haunting names on the map: the Handbook of Texas says it was named for a runaway slave — no name recorded, no story preserved, just the bayou keeping the memory of someone who ran for…
Aldine's identity is inextricably linked to its namesake, a woman whose presence helped shape the nascent community. The story begins with the construction of the International-Great Northern Railroad through the area…
That office campus off Interstate 45 at Springwoods Village is the global headquarters of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company that traces back to the Palo Alto garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started in…
North Forest (Houston, TX) placed on the 4A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Irvin Palacios (0.607 avg, 1 HR); Domarius Green (0.500 avg, 2 HR).
North Forest is picked third in District eleven, four-A Division Two, locked in a tight battle with Worthing for the two seed behind Yates. That seeding matters here — the preview says the bi-district matchup projects…
Before it was Splendora, this place was called 'Cox's Switch,' and that name tells you everything about the piece of technology that created this town. As you look at the railroad tracks that still run through the heart…
Aldine (Houston, TX) placed on the 6A Texas high school baseball stat leaderboards for the 2026 season: Raul Careaga (0.429 avg); Jansyel Barbosa (3 HR).
Swishahouse was founded in 1997 on Houston's Northside by DJ Michael '5000' Watts and OG Ron C (business partner G-Dash joined in 1999, when it became an official label). It was the north side's answer to the…
Don't blink or you'll miss Big Eddy — it's only about a mile and a half long, a short swampy channel that peels off just south of the San Jacinto Dam below Lake Houston and curls back to rejoin the San Jacinto River.…
Aldine High School, out on Airline Drive, sent two of its own to the major leagues within a few years of each other, and one of them got a moment most Hall of Famers never touch. Roger Pavlik, drafted by the Texas…
If you want a meal that belongs to Oak Ridge North rather than to a chain, Compadres Texas Cafe at 26797 Hanna Road is the local pick. It's a homestyle Tex-Mex cafe that has anchored this stretch of town for years, the…
For a city you can drive across in a couple of minutes, the social center of gravity is easy to find: Marilyn Edgar Park, over on Hillside Drive on the south side of town. It's the favorite gathering spot for Oak Ridge…
You're driving through Splendora, Texas, a town with a name as pretty as its origins. Back in the late 1800s, this place was just called Cox's Switch. But in 1896, the man who helped bring the railroad here, Charles…
Right on Oak Ridge North's main commercial drag, at 27326 Robinson Road, Marini's Pizza turns out hand-tossed New York-style pies in a town better known for its quiet wooded lots than its restaurants. The shop started…
You're cruising down I-45 South in Montgomery County, passing through Oak Ridge North. This community didn't exist until 1964, when a developer bought up land for a new subdivision. The timing was perfect: Interstate 45…
This quiet wetland east of Houston was born of World War II. In 1942–43 the federal government dammed Carpenters Bayou to pond water for the synthetic-rubber plants and war industries booming along the Houston Ship…
Don't blink or you'll miss Big Eddy — it's only about a mile and a half long, a short swampy channel that peels off just south of the San Jacinto Dam below Lake Houston and curls back to rejoin the San Jacinto River.…
That tricky name on the green sign carries one of Texas's oldest pioneer surnames. According to the Klein Texas Historical Foundation, brothers Abner, Joseph, and Robert Kuykendall came from Kentucky in the 1820s among…
This stretch of US-59 was a raw railroad clearing before it was a town. In the late 1880s, a man named Charles Cox talked the Houston, East and West Texas Railway into running a narrow-gauge spur up from Houston to haul…
Around 1977, one of the most important Texas sculptors of his generation pulled off the highway and made a home in these woods. James Surls and his wife, the artist Charmaine Locke, moved to Splendora and stayed roughly…
The piney woods that give this area its beauty also leave it wide open to violent weather, and on December 28, 2024, that came home hard. A little after noon, a tornado dropped out of a severe storm system and stayed on…
The piece of Interstate Forty Five you are on has a formal name. From State Highway Two Forty Two south to the Harris County line, this is the George P. Mitchell Memorial Highway, and it is aimed straight through the…
The whole reason a town grew here was the timber, and the work was brutal and cheap. Once the railroad spur reached Cox's Switch, the surrounding piney woods turned into a payroll: men logged, farmed, worked the…
Charles Cox gave Splendora its railroad and its name, and then he gave it a school. The first house of worship went up around 1895 near where the cemetery is now, and Green Leaf Missionary Baptist Church organized in…
In the late 1800s, the Houston, East and West Texas Railway, now the Union Pacific Railroad, decided to build a narrow-gauge spur at the location of what is now Splendora, originally known as 'Cox's Switch.' The area…
If you want to eat where the town actually eats, Splendora Cafe & BBQ at 23085 Speed Street is the local pick. It's a family-owned barbecue joint that has been smoking meat in Splendora since 2004, which by small-town…
You're driving past the Strack Cemetery, a final resting place for German immigrants who settled this area. The Strack brothers, Herman and Heinrich, arrived from Germany in 1848. By the mid-1850s, their other brothers,…
The very existence of Oak Ridge North is a testament to the power of civil engineering. Before the 1960s, this land was a dense forest, miles from Houston and largely inaccessible. The game-changer was the construction…
The wooded neighborhood you're passing started as a land deal. In 1964 an Arkansas outfit called the Spring Pines Corporation bought a big tract two miles north of Spring Creek, in the old Charles Eisterwall Survey…
By the late 1970s the people living here had a problem bigger than potholes: Houston. The big city to the south was aggressively annexing land outward, gobbling up unincorporated subdivisions and folding them into its…
Right here in Oak Ridge North, you're in a city born from an act of defiance. By the late 1970s, this was a comfortable, unincorporated subdivision. But a threat was looming from the south: the City of Houston. Back…
The founding of Oak Ridge North can be traced back to 1964 when the Spring Pines Corporation purchased land with the intention of creating a subdivision. The development was taken over by United Diversified, Inc. in…
Oak Ridge North is one of those rare towns you can say was engineered into existence, because without the freeway running past it the subdivision never pencils out. Construction on the North Freeway segment of…
You're driving through Houston's First Ward, and right here is the site of Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. Organized way back in 1869, it’s been a cornerstone of this community for over a century.…
Gum Gully is a five-mile stream on the northeast side, rising a couple miles east of Lake Houston and running south to Jackson Bayou near a spot called Tank Lake. The name comes straight from the woods it drains — the…
As you travel through Oak Ridge North, you might not realize you're on a tiny political island. The city is about a square mile and a half. But look at a map and you'll see something striking: it is hemmed in on every…
This modest channel had an identity crisis before it had a name. For decades it was just "the south fork of Greens Bayou," until the 1880s, when locals started calling it after Clinton Hall, a landowner whose family…
Look around and you'd be forgiven for thinking you're already in The Woodlands. You're not. Oak Ridge North is its own incorporated city, barely more than a square mile of land with around 3,000 residents, holding its…
The high school in this little town turned out a genuine NFL fixture. Brian Robison grew up in Splendora and starred at Splendora High School, where he earned all-state honors in two sports at once. On the field he was…
You're in Crosby, a town with Czech roots and a skillet in its past. After the railroad era began, immigrant families from Slovakia, Bohemia, and Moravia settled the farmland here, and their family names still mark the…
You're in Crosby, on land settled two centuries ago by one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists. Humphrey Jackson, an Irish-born settler, built a log cabin on the San Jacinto River about a half-mile west…