DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker at Grigsby's Bluff tells it, and I'm going to do it justice. Now, before Port Neches was Port Neches — before the refineries and the river traffic and all the rest of it — there was a man named Joseph Grigsby. Born in 1771.
And in 1827, he packed up his family and made the long haul from Kentucky down to the Sabine area of East Texas. That right there tells you something about the man. Kentucky was fine.
But East Texas was a frontier, and some people just have a nose for what's coming. The marker says he is said to have been the first grower of cotton in East Texas. Chew on that for a second.
First. In all of East Texas. Whether or not history has settled that claim entirely, somebody thought enough of it to put it in stone.
Then in 1834 — the same year that opens the dates on this marker — Joseph Grigsby received a land grant. Seventeen labors of land on the Neches River. That works out to three thousand and nine acres.
A serious piece of ground. And Grigsby didn't just sit on it. He built a wharf for sidewheel steamers right there on the Neches, and he founded a town.
His town. Grigsby's Bluff. Now, a man who builds a wharf and founds a town tends to have opinions about how things ought to be run.
So it should surprise nobody that Joseph Grigsby went on to serve in the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Congresses of the Republic of Texas. The Republic. This was Texas standing on its own two feet, and Grigsby had a seat at that table — more than once.
He died in 1841. The town he built kept breathing, kept growing, kept changing — until eventually Grigsby's Bluff became what we now call Port Neches. His family, the marker tells us, has given many leaders to Texas in the years since.
And here's the part that gets me. You want to find where Grigsby's Bluff actually stood? There's no grand monument at the spot, no bronze statue of the man with his hand outstretched toward the river.
What marks the site is a pecan tree. A huge pecan tree, over at the Texaco Refinery, six blocks southeast of where you're standing. That tree was there.
It watched the sidewheelers come and go. It watched a republic rise and a town get renamed. Joseph Grigsby has been gone since 1841, but that tree is still keeping the address.
What the marker says
(1834-1902) Joseph Grigsby (1771-1841) and family migrated from Kentucky to the Sabine area in 1827. He is said to have been the first grower of cotton in East Texas. In 1834 he received a grant of 17 labors (3,009 acres) of land on the Neches. Here he built a wharf for sidewheel steamers and founded town of grigsby's Bluff. He served in 2nd, 3rd and 5th congresses of the Republic of Texas. His settlement became Port Neches, and his family has given many leaders to Texas. A huge pecan tree (at Texaco Refinery, 6 blocks SE) marks site of Grigsby's Bluff.