The Neches and the War: Beaumont's Shipbuilding Years

The Neches River gave Beaumont its reason to exist before oil gave it its fortune. The river connected the lumber camps of the East Texas Piney Woods to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying timber south on steamboats through country too dense and wet for wagons. The Port of Beaumont traces its commercial roots to that timber trade, deepened its channel to nine feet in nineteen oh eight, then to twenty-five, and eventually to forty by the nineteen forties.

By the time the United States entered the First World War, a small island in the Neches had already become an industrial site. In nineteen seventeen, the Beaumont Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company was founded on that island, building wooden cargo ships and schooners from local pine, intended for the Allied supply lines in Europe. The rotary saw and the rotary drill had come to the same river bend within fifteen years of each other.

Between the wars the yards contracted. Then the Second World War arrived and the Neches became a production corridor. The Pennsylvania Shipyard received fifty million dollars in emergency contracts for tugboats and barges. Bethlehem Steel, Gulf Shipbuilding, and Jones and Laughlin all established or expanded operations in the Sabine-Neches Waterway corridor that runs from Beaumont to Port Arthur to Orange. Workers poured in from across Texas and the Gulf South.

After the war, Bethlehem bought the island yard in nineteen forty-eight and shifted it toward offshore drilling-rig fabrication, a pivot that anticipated the next phase of the petroleum economy. The island has served, in one industrial form or another, through every American conflict since the First World War.

The deep-water port today handles military equipment deployments, grain, and petroleum products. It is one of the top military cargo ports in the United States, a designation earned across a century of industrial work done at a river bend that early settlers thought was good mainly for floating logs.