DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker's the source here, and I'm just the one spinning it out for you. Now, pull up a chair, because this is the kind of story Texas does real well — the kind where a town rises up full of ambition and then just... disappears, quiet as a morning you almost remember. Way back in 1835, a man named Horatio M.
Hanks had himself a land grant from the government of Mexico. On that grant, somebody sat down and laid out a town. Not a little scrape of a settlement, either — at least one hundred and sixty blocks were planned.
One hundred and sixty. That's a city someone was dreamin' about on the shore of what we now call Lake Sabine. They named it Aurora.
Like the dawn itself. Then came the Texas Revolution, and everything shuffled around the way revolutions tend to do. Hanks' partner and agent, a man by the name of Alamazon Huston, stepped in and sold the first fifteen lots.
November the twenty-seventh, eighteen thirty-seven. You can still find it in the deed records if you know where to look — the town was showing up in those records as late as eighteen fifty. Folks were buying, folks were building, folks were betting on Aurora.
But here's where the story turns, the way Texas weather has a habit of doing without much warning. By eighteen eighty, the land was sold by the state for its taxes. Nobody'd kept up.
And then nature stepped in to finish what neglect had started — hurricanes, freezes, and a hard lack of medical services. One by one, folks left. By eighteen ninety, the shoreline of Lake Sabine sat deserted.
Aurora, that town of a hundred and sixty planned blocks and fifteen sold lots, was gone. The marker puts it about as well as anything I could say: Aurora bloomed and faded like the dawn, from which it took its name. That shoreline stayed quiet for five years.
Then, in eighteen ninety-five, something new rose up right where the silence had settled in. They called it Port Arthur. Some stretches of ground just refuse to stay forgotten.
What the marker says
Laid out in 1835 on land grant from government of Mexico to Horatio M. Hanks. At least 160 blocks were planned. After the Texas Revolution, Hanks' partner and agent Alamazon Huston sold first 15 lots on Nov. 27, 1837. Deed records show town existed late as 1850. By 1880 the land was sold by state for its taxes. Hurricanes, freezes and lack of medical services caused the area to be deserted by 1890. Aurora bloomed and faded like the dawn, from which it took its name, leaving shoreline of Lake Sabine deserted until 1895, when Port Arthur was founded. (1966)