Mont Belvieu, Texas

Everything Mont Belvieu is known for

1 song mention this city 0 artists from here

Music in Mont Belvieu

Songs About Mont Belvieu

the ballad of lavern and captain flint
guy clark
10%

Artists From Mont Belvieu

No artists from Mont Belvieu in the database yet.

Rivers & Roads in Song near Mont Belvieu

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Mont Belvieu.

Interstate 10 36 songs Trinity River 11 songs US Route 90 9 songs U.S. Route 59 9 songs Interstate 45 8 songs FM 3005 2 songs

History of Mont Belvieu

A salt dome explosion moved the town RoadyGoat

Imagine getting a notice that your entire town has to move. That's exactly what happened in Mont Belvieu. By the 1980s, the original townsite sat directly on top of and adjacent to one of the world's largest collections of underground hydrocarbon storage caverns. After a series of dangerous accidents, including pipeline ruptures and explosions, residents lived in constant fear. The final straw came in 1985, when an explosion threatened the salt dome beneath the town. This time the townspeople pushed back, pressuring the petrochemical companies operating over that dome to buy out the homes closest to their plants, and they did. The corporations purchased the properties directly from families, and by 1990 a dozen of those companies had bought out roughly two hundred households. With the aid of those same local industries, the community rebuilt itself about two miles east: a new city hall, new churches, and the relocated Barbers Hill schools. The old townsite, near roads like Perry Avenue, was slowly demolished and turned into a buffer zone for the plants. The Mont Belvieu you see today exists because the old one agreed to disappear for the safety of its people.

RoadyGoat →

The Town That Bought Itself Out and Moved RoadyGoat

Most towns are destroyed by a single disaster. Mont Belvieu was undone slowly, by the same salt dome that made it valuable. Starting in the 1970s, the caverns hollowed into the dome to store liquefied petroleum gas began to leak, and the gas crept silently through the ground beneath homes. Leaks and explosions plagued the original townsite for years, and after a deadly 1985 blast at the storage complex, residents pushed the petrochemical companies to simply buy them out. They did. By 1990 roughly 200 families had been bought out by about a dozen corporations, and with industry money the community was rebuilt about two miles east of where it had stood. Whole institutions went with the people: the First United Methodist Church physically relocated its 1932 sanctuary in 1986. It is one of the strangest civic stories in Texas, a town that negotiated its own removal and reassembled itself on safer ground, leaving the old hill to the tanks, pipes, and brine ponds that had pushed it out. Today's prosperous Mont Belvieu is, almost entirely, the relocated version. (Source: Handbook of Texas; UPI archives.)

RoadyGoat →

Hollow Mountains of Salt RoadyGoat

Mont Belvieu is the epicenter of America's natural gas liquids, or NGLs, and it’s because of a brilliant engineering feat that turns a geological wonder into a giant storage tank. The Barbers Hill Salt Dome is a massive, pure salt deposit. To create storage, engineers use a process called 'solution mining.' They drill a well deep into the salt and pump in massive quantities of fresh water. The water dissolves the salt, creating a hollow chamber, or cavern. The resulting saltwater, called brine, is pumped out, leaving behind a huge, sealed, and incredibly strong underground void. These engineered caverns, some as large as the Empire State Building, are perfect for storing hydrocarbons like propane and ethane under immense pressure. They are naturally impermeable and geologically stable. This combination of a perfect salt dome and clever engineering is why Mont Belvieu can safely store billions of gallons of NGLs, making it the most important hub of its kind in the world.

RoadyGoat →

Tilton Cemetery

1829

According to family tradition, Charles Nathan Tilton was a cabin boy and boatswain's mate for the pirate Jean Laffite. Records show that Tilton came to Texas about 1829. He married Anna Barber, the 15-year-old daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Barrow Barber, in 1831. They made their home in this area. Tilton fought in the Texas revolution, returning home during the "Runaway Scrape" to ensure the safety of his family. In 1838 he was granted a headright including 1,496 acres of land near this site. The Tilton family lived for a time on Matagorda Peninsula, where they named their home Tiltona and Charles engaged in shipping and cattle ventures. The land speculator and Congressman Samuel Maverick adapted his brand from Tilton's when he bought Tiltona and 400 heard of cattle in 1847. The Tilton family returned to Chambers County that same year. Between 1853 and 1860, Michael Chavenoe, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto and a Tilton family friend, died while visiting the family. Charles and Anna Tilton set aside an acre of land for a family cemetery at that time. Charles Tilton died in 1861 while in Galveston attending to his freight hauling business. He was interred here on Christmas Day. Anna Tilton died in 1883 and was buried beside her husband. Charles and Anna's nine children and their descendants continued to use the family graveyard. Veterans of the Texas revolution, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War are interred here. Cared for by Tilton descendants, the cemetery remains as a chronicle of early Texas pioneers. (1999)

Historical Marker → · 3.9 mi away

Barbers Hill Oilfield

1916

The Barbers Hill oilfield is located in northwestern Chambers County at the junction of State Highway 146 and Farm Road 1942, near Mont Belvieu, approximately thirty miles northeast of Houston. The field was discovered in April 1916 and named for Barbers Hill, a salt dome named in turn for an early settler, Amos Barber . A water well in the Barbers Hill region had shown traces of natural gas as early as 1889, and serious efforts to find oil were made following the discovery of the Spindletop oilfield in 1901. After some twenty-eight failures, drillers completed a small well at a depth of 1,571 feet in 1916. Although commercial production began two years later, development remained slow until the latter 1920s, when vast quantities of oil were found at greater depths. In 1930 the first well to produce from below the salt dome on the Gulf Coast was brought in at Barbers Hill, at below 5,000 feet. Peak annual production came in 1931, when 8,085,278 barrels was recovered at Barbers Hill. In 1951 production still stood at more than two million barrels annually, and the cumulative total exceeded ninety-five million barrels. By 1974 oil had been discovered at deeper than 10,000 feet below the surface at Barbers Hill. The total output reached nearly 130 million barrels by the end of 1984. Large quantities of natural gas have also been recovered from the field. In addition to yielding oil and natural gas, the field has in more recent years served as an underground storage facility. Man-made caverns have been carved from the huge salt dome to store liquid propane gas for the area's numerous refineries. On November 5, 1985, an explosion killed two workers and threatened Mont Belvieu, thus redoubling efforts of local residents to force the petrochemical industries to buy out homes in the immediate vicinity so residents can move elsewhere.

Tsha Handbook →

Green, Clarence

1951

Blues guitarist and band leader Clarence Green was born in Mont Belvieu, Texas, in Chambers County, on January 1, 1934. He was a versatile guitarist who should not be confused with the piano-playing blues singer Clarence "Candy" Green (1929-88) from nearby Galveston. Green, the guitar player, was a stalwart of the Houston scene who fronted a number of popular bands, the most famous being the Rhythmaires, between the early 1950s and his death. The oldest son of a Creole mother, he grew up in Houston's Fifth Ward in the neighborhood known as Frenchtown . He had first started making music on homemade stringed instruments devised in collaboration with his brother, Cal Green, who later served as lead guitarist for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and did studio work for Ray Charles and other stars, relocating permanently to California in the process. Clarence, however, opted to stay close to home all his life, choosing the security of full-time employment with Houston Light and Power, where he worked for twenty years. Nevertheless, he found ample opportunity in the Bayou City to exploit his musical talents, both on stage and in recordings. He started out around 1951 or 1952 in a group that called itself Blues For Two. Throughout the next decade the band's personnel changed often; some of the more well-known members, at various times, included fellow guitarists Johnny Copeland and Joe Hughes . Green went on to lead the High Type Five, the Cobras (not to be confused with the mid-1970s Austin-based band of the same name led by Paul Ray), and ultimately his most well-known ensemble, the Rhythmaires, which was a mainstay of the Houston scene for over thirty years. Mixing blues, jazz , and soul music--and playing in all manner of venues, from small clubs in the old wards to grand corporate affairs downtown and in private mansions--the Rhythmaires are remembered not only for Green's precisely swinging performances on electric guitar, but also for the many female vocalists they developed and featured over the years, including Iola Broussard, Gloria Edwards, Luvenia Lewis (who married Cal Green but did not follow him to the West Coast), Trudy Lynn, Faye Robinson, Lavelle White, and others. Starting in the late 1950s and continuing through the 1960s, Green also did regular session work as a guitarist at various studios, the most notable being Duke Records, where he backed artists such as Bobby Bland, Joe Hinton, and Junior Parker and released a few singles, including "Keep On Working," under his own name. In 1958 he had recorded his first single, "Mary My Darling," for the C & P label, which later leased it to Chicago-based Chess Records. In the following years he made numerous records for a variety of other small labels, including Shomar (which released his "Crazy Strings" in 1962), All Boy, Aquarius, Bright Star, Lynn, Pope, and Golden Eagle. His backing personnel on these tracks varied from session to session but occasionally included notable Texas blues musicians such as Henry Hayes, Wilbur McFarland, Teddy Reynolds , Ivory Lee Semien, and Hop Wilson . Green did not always receive proper compensation for his many recordings, especially as they began to reappear on compact disk in the 1990s. In 1994 he became a co-plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against one of his former producers on behalf of fifteen Houston blues musicians or their descendants. Just days before Green died of natural causes in Houston on March 13, 1997, a federal jury ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In the final months of his life Green was especially focused on performing gospel music in the context of religious worship, especially at the Frenchtown institution known as Buck Street Memorial Church of God in Christ, where he served as a deacon for many years. Green had a daughter, three sons, and several stepchildren.

Tsha Handbook →

Mont Belvieu, TX

1985

Mont Belvieu is at the intersection of State Highway 146 and Farm Road 1942, slightly north of Interstate Highway 10 and thirty-two miles east of Houston on a salt dome in northwestern Chambers County. The area's first permanent settler was Amos Barber , who built the first home on the hill in 1849. The community that grew up near the Barber homestead was known as Barbers Hill. Seeking to avoid confusion with other offices with similar names, postal authorities suggested a change to Mont Belvieu. In 1890 the Mont Belvieu post office opened with Z. T. Winfree as postmaster. In 1920 the population was estimated at only twenty. The first commercial production at the Barbers Hill oilfield had begun in 1918, and the Goose Creek and Dayton Railroad was completed through Mont Belvieu the following year. The townsite plat was filed in May 1922 by Marion, Amanda, J. W., and Daisy Williams. A cotton gin operated at Mont Belvieu from 1924 to 1935. The most important development was the discovery of more oil at greater depths during the late 1920s. Several Work Projects Administration projects were credited with helping the community weather the Great Depression , although a weekly newspaper, the Mont Belvieu Citizen , was closed after a brief run in 1932. By the mid-1930s thirty businesses served the growing oil town, which had an estimated 500 residents by the 1940s. Mont Belvieu had incorporated by 1970, when it was credited with a population of 1,144. By 1980 the figure had increased to 1,730. The community was by then closely tied to the Houston-Baytown area. The growth of local industries had, however, proved a mixed blessing. A 1985 explosion at one of the plants threatened the entire salt dome, which had in recent years been used to store liquid propane gas, and led to a series of efforts by townspeople to force the petrochemical industries to buy out the homes in the immediate vicinity of their plants. By 1990 some 200 families had been bought out by a dozen petrochemical corporations. With the aid of these local industries the community was rebuilt two miles east of its 1985 location. Among the buildings at the new site were a city hall, seven new churches, and a public school. In 1990 the rebuilt community recorded 1,323 inhabitants. The population grew in 2000 to 2,324 residents.

Tsha Handbook →

Amos Barber Homesite and Cemetery

1849

Originally known as "Big Hill" and Later "Barbers Hill," Mont Belvieu was first settled by Amos Barber (1814-1885). Born in Louisiana, he came to Texas as a youth and in 1848 married Susan Ann Hodges Fitzgerald (1827-1910). In 1849 he hauled logs on a sled drawn by oxen to this site, where he erected a two-story dog trot cabin. Nearby stood an orchard of peach and fig trees, and surrounding plantation land was stocked with horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, and an assortment of poultry. On the main road from Huntsville to Lynchburg, the Barber cabin was frequented by travelers and friends, including Sam Houston and Ashbel Smith. Barber, a real estate broker and cattleman, enlarged the dwelling over the years to accommodate his family of ten children. He and his wife are buried south of their original homestead in the family cemetery, which is still used and maintained by their descendants. About 1923 the home was dismantled, leaving only a well as evidence of its existence. A rooming house built on the site was later bought by the Woodmen of the World for a lodge hall. Mont Belvieu Church of Christ, given adjacent land by Barber's eldest daughter Amanda Melissa (1850-1933) and her husband Marion Williams (1851-1934), acquired this property in 1974.

Historical Marker →

Barbers Hill Oil Field

1889

While digging a 65-ft. water well near his home in 1889, Elmer W. Barber (1854-1935), whose father Amos Barber first settled this area, encountered inflammable gas near the top of the salt dome known as Barbers Hill. After the Spindletop discovery in 1901, prospectors sought leases here. In 1902 Pattillo Higgins (1863-1955), an early Spindletop promoter, drilled on the northwest slope of the hill. His shallow well, like those of other early operations, yielded little, and the low price of crude oil discouraged large investment. The United Petroleum Co. No. 1 Fisher, drilled in 1918, produced 70 barrels a day, the field's first oil in commercial quantities. Drilling resumed in 1926, when the Mills Bennett Production co. and the Humphreys Corp. brought in the A. E. Barber No. 1, yielding 500 barrels a day. The success later that year of their B-2 Kirby, reaching a depth of 4,174 ft., triggered a leasing campaign and launched a period of rapid expansion which lasted until the late 1930s. Rows of oil derricks and tent dwellings were a common sight during the boom. As the population of the community grew, oil money helped upgrade and enlarge school facilities. By 1977, the local economy had shifted from production to storage of petroleum..

Historical Marker →

Things to Do in Mont Belvieu

historical 23.9 mi away
Space Center Houston

Houston we have a problem. Every word spoken between Apollo astronauts and Earth came through Mission Control at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston. The…
historical 24.7 mi away
NASA Johnson Space Center

Houston we have a problem. Where Mission Control guided Apollo 11 to the moon.
historical 14.2 mi away
San Jacinto Monument

Taller than the Washington Monument. Where Texas won independence in 18 minutes.
historical 14.2 mi away
San Jacinto Monument

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…
historical 14.4 mi away
Battleship Texas

The last surviving WWI-era dreadnought. Fought at D-Day and Iwo Jima.

Sports in Mont Belvieu

🏆 STATE CHAMPIONS Class 5A · Softball · 2021

Barbers Hill Eagles — 2021 UIL 5A Softball State Champions

Most recent: 2021 5A

Mont Belvieu, Texas – Barbers Hill High School, a Class 5A powerhouse in softball, has firmly established its reputation on the diamond. The Eagles' program proudly displays a UIL State Championship from 2021, a significant achievement for the community. This consistent performance reflects the dedication within the Barbers Hill athletic program.

The town of Mont Belvieu rallies behind its Eagles, creating an atmosphere of spirited support for their teams. The success of Barbers Hill softball resonates throughout the area, highlighting the strong tradition of high school sports in this part of Texas.

State titles
2021
Most recent
2021
Class
5A
The moment

The 2021 Class 5A State Championship represents a pinnacle for Barbers Hill High School softball.

Sources: Wikipedia · UIL State Championship Archives · SI High School (ScoreBook Live)

Everything Near Mont Belvieu

556 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Mont Belvieu on the Map
All music from Texas → · Browse more cities