What would Dallas and Houston be like if the other was never founded? (San Antonio: living)

[Mr. Clutch]

Topic is self-explanatory. How do you think each city/region would be different today if the Allen Brothers and John Neely Bryan had never founded Houston and Dallas, respectively? What would be their place in Texas and the US if each did not have the other to contend with economically? I'm curious to what y'all think.

Assume that other nearby cities founded in the same timeframe (i.e. Fort Worth and Galveston) were still founded for the purposes of this discussion.

[ParaguaneroSwag]

The last statement pretty much ruined the thread

. If Fort Worth were still there while Dallas wasn’t, Fort Worth would be similar to how Houston is today in terms of size and population and North Texas would still be a world Class metropolis like it is today.

If Houston didn’t exist but Galveston did, a natural equivalent to Houston would happen in generally the same area, and the Greater “Houston equivalent” would still be a world class metro area/

[madrone2k]

The 1900 Hurricane is considered to have ended Galveston's Golden Era. After that, development money moved to Houston, which reaped the benefits of the Spindletop oil discovery in 1901 and opening of the Houston Ship Channel in 1914. Perhaps Dallas might have benefitted even more from that oil discovery, since it wound up being important anyway in the East Texas Field and elsewhere. Regarding the latter issue (a more protected port), it's harder to say where that business would go. Corpus Christi or Beaumont, perhaps? ParaguaneroSwag's idea may have been more likely: moving port facilities from Galveston to a new development upstream of Galveston Bay.

I'm less familiar with the history of DFW, but I would guess that Fort Worth would be a more likely surrogate for Dallas than Galveston would be for Houston.

On a related note, it’s interesting to look at the The Texas Almanac’s population statistics.(Note: these are for each city, not metro areas.)

City 1900 1950
Houston 44,633 596,163
Dallas 42,638 434,462
Galveston 37,788 66,568
Fort Worth 26,688 278,778

[turf3]

Well, if the railroads hadn't chosen the small town of Dallas as a terminus, somewhere else nearby would have been chosen - Ft. Worth, Waco, Tyler, what have you.

If Houston hadn't been sitting there the enormous bay and great harbor would still have existed, so another one of the small towns along the bay would have become the shipping center of the western Gulf Coast, and then when oil was discovered nearby, would have become the petrochemical capital of the US.

In other words, if those two towns hadn't existed it would have been necessary to create them.

[Trainwreck20]

Yeah, Dallas lies in a geographically useful location for travel - E/W/N/S. If it wasn't there, it still would be, more or less - maybe a little north or east of the current location. Further west has some more water limitations and is more removed from a useful N/S corridor.

For all intents and purposes, Houston really includes that whole area. So if Houston wasn't there, then one of the other nearby cities would have expanded to fill that role as a shipping port. If is possible maybe Beaumont or Corpus could have grown but, similar to Dallas, that geographical location is very functional.

So, I really don't see things developing differently. I could see Austin not being anything like it is today if the capitol was in Houston or Dallas or San Antonio.

[jackalope48]

In Houston's case it would have been a toss up between Corpus and Texas City. Corpus didn't get it's deep water port until after it's own devastating hurricane in 1919 and the storm that wiped out Indianola(never rebuilt).

Corpus' pitch to Congress was that as devastating as the storm was in wiping out North Beach and Downtown and killing 700+ people the bulk of the city actually survived with little to no damage due to most of the population living on the 30 foot bluff overlooking Downtown(present day Uptown). Considering what happened in Galveston and Indianola that was actually a good pitch. Coupled with a locally funded 17 foot seawall Congress approved the money for a deep water port.

Texas City already had it's port dredging to 25 feet in the 1900 storm and the fact that the storm didn't damage it to the point of closure would have meant that the immediate traffic would have gone there.

Much like Corpus is getting a huge amount of development from the Permian and Eagleford I'd imagine that if Houston hadn't existed that there still would have been a large amount of port development in Texas City and Beaumont/Port Arthur from the East Texas oil boom.