Webster: Gardentown on the Road to Galveston
Texas
Webster started out as Gardentown, a stopping-off point on the trail between Houston and Galveston, founded in eighteen seventy-nine by James W. Webster. He had hoped to draw English colonists to the area, and his name stuck even as the colony idea faded.
A post office arrived in eighteen ninety, and by the early nineteen hundreds Japanese immigrant farmers had established rice as the dominant crop. Webster incorporated in nineteen fifty-eight, just three years before NASA announced it would plant the Johnson Space Center nearby. That proximity changed everything.
What had been a quiet agricultural crossroads became one of the fastest-growing communities on the Gulf Coast, now home to aerospace contractors, medical companies, and roughly twelve and a half thousand residents.
