Hurricanes have always figured into Texas history. Twenty-five years before the well known hurricane that damaged so much of Galveston in 1900, another one struck the town of Indianola. Indianola was located roughly halfway between Galveston and Corpus Christi on the western side of Matagorda Bay. It is now a lightly inhabited community a few miles southeast of Port Lavaca, but once was a busy port.
Around 1844 it began to be the location for a number of arriving German immigrants. At the time, there were no structures to speak of. Those who came to Texas here were no doubt glad to see land, but there was little else to greet them in this low lying marshy area. Over the next thirty plus years though, it had grown to a town of around 5,000 people. The town lay at sea level, as many Texas coastal towns did, and still do. On September 15, 1875 a storm hit that hammered the coast with winds that exceeded eighty to one hundred miles per hour and a storm surge that extended inland for ten to twenty miles.
Early on the morning of September 15, Sergeant C. A. Smith of the Army Signal Corps had recorded a barometric pressure reading of 28.90 and wind speed of 82 miles per hour. He recorded that wind speed had increased to 86 miles per hour before the anemometer was destroyed. After the worst of the storm had died down, the survivors assessed the damage. The court house and seven other buildings survived though they were damaged. All the rest of the buildings were blown away. Some 270 lives were lost along with an estimated fifteen thousand farm animals.(1)
Over a dozen of the dead are buried in the Indianola Cemetery. One of them was Robert Baxter Moore. He was born on April 11, 1807 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In the 1860 federal census, Robert, his wife Mary Crowell Moore and five or six children were living in Indianola. He worked as a carpenter. By the time the 1870 census was recorded, four of the children were living at home and Robert was still working as a carpenter. He had survived an earlier bout with yellow fever but drowned during the hurricane. Also buried there is Robert Jope, a local Episcopal minister and his family. Reverend Jope’s first wife Maria Brown Jope had died in 1864 in Iowa where they had formerly lived. Both Robert and Maria were originally born in Scotland and had been married in a wedding in England in 1852. Twin daughters were born to this union. After Maria’s death, Robert had married Mary Seymour of Virginia. Lost to the storm were Jope, his twin ten year old daughters Lillie Jessie and Annie Jope, his second wife Mary and their son, Davenport.
In the confusion, William Taylor, who had been in jail at Indianola was able to make good his escape after reportedly assisting in rescue attempts. Taylor had been arrested by the sheriff of DeWitt County and was on trial for the 1874 killing of Gabriel Slaughter, an associate of the Suttons in connection with the Sutton-Taylor Feud. A number of people were in town at the time of the storm, planning to attend the trial. Taylor was later recaptured, again put on trial in Indianola for murder and was acquitted of the crime. Gabriel Slaughter, one of the victims, was twenty-one years old and had been standing with William E. Sutton on board the steamer Clinton when they were allegedly shot and killed by cousins Jim and Bill Taylor in March, 1874. There were numerous killings both before and after Slaughter’s and Sutton’s death. The Sutton-Taylor Feud continued for the next couple of years before it was only ended with the help of Texas Rangers. Around eighty deaths are attributed to some aspect of this conflict.
The 1875 storm was hoped by some to have been a “once in a century” occurrence, and the town was rebuilt over the next few years, though to a greatly reduced extent. The summer of 1886 turned out to be a wild one for local weather. An article in the Austin American-Statesman of June 22, 1886 told the story of the schooner Columbo that had just weathered a tropical storm. Commanded by Captain W. C. Letts, the ship had left Galveston bound for Indianola. The sea was heavy when they embarked but the weather quickly deteriorated further into a gale or hurricane. Arriving near Indianola, Letts was unable to cross the bar and stood off shore, intending to go to port when the weather cleared. Instead the Columbo was carried away about 150 miles to the southwest. Finally the storm subsided and Letts was able to bring his ship back to Indianola, though the rigging had been torn and stripped. Another ship, a fishing boat named the Edna C., was not so fortunate and was thought to have sunk with her captain and crew of five near a place known as the snapper banks.
The final blow to Indianola began two months later on August 19, 1886. According to a report published in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette on August 21, 1886, the winds began to blow and increased to hurricane force the next morning. After the storm subsided, a relief party out of Victoria reported that their train had to stop four miles away since just ahead of them, over two miles of the track had been mangled or washed away. They walked closer to the town to find the bridge also washed out and the surrounding area was waist deep in water. Across the bayou, the railroad agent at Indianola, a Mr. Clemente, reported that the lower end of town was gone, along with the wharf. Some bodies had been recovered but many more were missing and Clemente provided them with a short list. The storm surge was estimated at fifteen feet. Despite all the water, some structures were seen to have been damaged by fires thought to have been started by burning lamps in buildings as they collapsed. Perhaps because the worst of the storm happened during the day and the population was lower, the loss of life was less than fifty from this storm, but the once promising town Indianola never recovered.
(1) Cox, Mike, “Texas Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival,” Globe Pequot, 2015
© 2024, all rights reserved.
Texas History Notebook 