Mapping Texas: The Gulf Coast — Coastal Counties, Part 1
The Texas General Land Office and the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum are pleased to jointly present Mapping Texas: The Gulf Coast, which includes ten unique maps covering 252 years of Texas history, from 1740–1992. The maps showcased in this exhibit demonstrate the diverse history of Texas’ Gulf Coast.
With 367 miles of beaches on the Gulf of Mexico, more than 3,300 miles of bays and estuaries, and hundreds of communities, Texas has one of the longest, most vibrant coastlines in the United States. From the earliest days of European settlement to modern navigation and oil drilling, the mapping of Texas’ coast has always been of vital importance.
To view the map below in greater detail, click on the image to access the map’s database entry.
Coastal Counties
The Texas Coastal Bend is the flat area of land along the Texas Gulf Coast, within which twenty-six counties are located. The coastal counties have a long history of settlement, from Native American tribes to the arrival of the European explorers. The counties of the coast provided a place for trade, immigration, and commerce to flourish in Texas.
Located along the Texas coast, Matagorda Bay was the 1685 landing place of French Explorer René Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle. In good weather, it provided a safe harbor for people and trade goods for the next three hundred years.[1]
Tasked by an act of the Congress of the Republic of Texas to survey the bay, county surveyor James H. Selkirk recorded this working legal document for the General Land Office in 1838. Each tract surveyed indicates the original land grant holder’s name and the size of the grant in varas, a Spanish land measurement equaling roughly 33.33 inches.[2]
Selkirk decorated his map with an ornate title and cartouche full of symbols. The woman represents liberty, modernity, and the United States to Texas’ east. She holds a staff with a Liberty cap on top and the U. S. Capitol building is in the background.[3] The West is seen as a wilderness represented as an American Indian warrior with bow and arrows, with a forest or thicket of trees behind him. Between them is a stack of goods with a steamship and tall ship in the distance, acknowledging the ongoing immigration and commercial trade which came into Texas through Matagorda Bay.
Mapping Texas: The Gulf Coast runs through January 2017. For more information about viewing the exhibit, please visit http://www.thestoryoftexas.com/visit/exhibits/mapping-texas.
To learn more about the Texas Coast today, please visit txcoasts.com
[1] For more on La Salle see https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fla04
[2] For more on the Texas vara see http://sizes.com/units/vara_texas.htm
[3] For more on the Liberty Cap and art see https://www.aoc.gov/blog/liberty-cap-art-us-capitol
