The Woodlands: Akokisa Hunting Ground to Ecological Suburb

Twenty-seven miles north of Houston, the piney woods of Montgomery County were home for centuries to the Akokisa and Bidai peoples, Atakapan-speaking nations who hunted and gathered in these river-laced forests along the West Fork of the San Jacinto River. Spanish missionaries pushed north through this territory in the seventeen hundreds, and by the nineteenth century Anglo settlers were logging the longleaf pines that gave the land its character. Oil and gas exploration followed in the early twentieth century.

The land sat as mostly uncleared timber country until George Mitchell, a Houston wildcatter who had made his fortune in natural gas, bought seventeen thousand acres here in the late nineteen sixties. Mitchell hired ecological planner Ian McHarg and set an unusual rule: at least twenty-five percent of the land had to stay forested. The Woodlands opened on October nineteenth, nineteen seventy-four, with drainage designed to mimic the original watershed.

Today it is home to more than one hundred fourteen thousand people, and the tree canopy that Mitchell insisted on still defines it.