DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and friend, this one's worth every word. Bolivar Point — a spit of Texas coastline that has seen more history wash over it than most places twice its size. Let me take you through it.
In 1815, Colonel Henry Perry set up a military camp right here, part of a plan to invade Spanish Texas. Just the starting gun on decades of ambition, conflict, and outright drama at this single stretch of ground. Then in 1816, a Galveston-based privateer by the name of Louis-Michel de Aury arrived — and what he did next deserves to be said plainly and with weight.
Aury forced shiploads of captured African slaves to walk from this very point all the way to New Orleans along old Indian trails. That is not a footnote. That is a crime written into the geography of this place, and it doesn't get softened just because time has passed.
Now, Aury is also credited with something else — naming the point after South American liberator Simón Bolívar. The same man. Hold that contradiction in your hand a moment.
A few years on, in 1820 and 1821, a man named James Long was here, commanding a filibuster aimed at winning Texas independence, and he established Fort Las Casas right on Bolivar Point. His wife, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, was with him — and in December of 1821, inside that fort, she gave birth to a daughter named Mary James. Mary James Long.
History often calls her the first Anglo child born in Texas. Born at a fort, on a windswept point, in the middle of someone's bid for revolution. That child came into a complicated world.
Now, the Federal government erected a lighthouse here in 1852 — a tall, dependable beacon standing watch over the Gulf. Confederate soldiers dismantled it during the Civil War, but it was rebuilt after the war ended, standing again like it had something to prove. And it would need to.
When the great storms of 1900 and 1915 came roaring in off the Gulf, many area residents fled to that lighthouse for shelter. That rebuilt lighthouse, the one the Confederates had torn down, became the thing that kept people alive. Then there's the railroad.
The Gulf and Interstate Railroad was completed from Beaumont all the way to Bolivar Point in 1896 — a genuine boon to the peninsula's farmers, connecting them to a wider world. The 1900 storm destroyed it. Just gone.
But it was rebuilt in 1903, because people on this peninsula do not quit easily. Ferry service eventually became the thread tying Bolivar Point to Galveston Island, and in 1933 the Texas Highway Department purchased that service, making the crossing free to the public — and it still runs today. Bolivar Point has been a camp, a crossing, a fort, a shelter, a station, and a scene of terrible human suffering — all before most places even get their first chapter written.
That's what this marker is keepin' for the record.
What the marker says
In 1815 Colonel Henry Perry established a military camp here as part of a plan to invade Spanish Texas. In 1816 Galveston-based privateer Louis-Michel de Aury forced shiploads of captured African Slaves to walk from this point to New Orleans along old Indian Trails. Aury is credited with naming the point after South American liberator Simon Bolivar. While commanding a filibuster to win Texas independence, James Long established Fort Las Casas on Bolivar Point in 1820-21. His wife, Jane Herbert (Wilkinson), gave birth to a daughter, Mary James, in December 1821 at the fort. Mary James Long is often referred to as the first Anglo child born in Texas. A lighthouse, erected here by the Federal government in 1852 and later dismantled by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was rebuilt after the war. Many area residents sought shelter within the lighthouse during the damaging storms of 1900 and 1915. The Gulf and Interstate Railroad was completed from Beaumont to Bolivar Point in 1896. A boon to peninsula farmers, the railroad was destroyed in the 1900 storm, then rebuilt in 1903. Ferry service, purchased by the Texas Highway Department in 1933, continues to provide free public access to Galveston Island. (1995)