The Vanished Texas Coast with author Mark Lardas Pt 2

Mark Lardas Part 2 Transcript

Benjamin Morris

Let us journey even deeper into the strange and bizarre moments of the past when we take a look at what happened in the Civil War to Indianola and to its undoing down the road.

Benjamin Morris (32:19):

So, you write that the Civil War years actually presented a novel experience for the residents of the area, and that they were occupied. There were skirmishes, there were battles, and they were occupied by the Union forces.

Mark Lardas (32:33):

Yes. The Union tried to control the Texas coast. They didn't try and go much inland, and when they did, they generally had bad luck. There were other battles covered in other chapters of this book that show you exactly how strange things got.

Mark Lardas (32:56):

Indianola's occupation was pretty benign, other than the fact that this is a port city, and it depends on cargoes coming from inland and being shipped out. And that stopped.

Mark Lardas (33:10):

So, from an economic standpoint, that was a really hard time for Indianola. And plus, you had the humiliation of being occupied.

Mark Lardas (33:24):

And while there were portions of Texas that were very friendly to the north, the Texas coast wasn't one of them. But the thing is that once the war ended, all of a sudden, Indianola is how you get stuff inland again. And it boomed from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the 1870s. And again-

Benjamin Morris (34:00):

Yeah, markets need to open back up and people are trying to resume some semblance of commerce that is critical for the original survival, of course.

Mark Lardas (34:10):

There was another factor at work too, which was the fact that the Morgan Line was in a feud with the Port of Galveston because Galveston had previously given them free warpage, but then decided they were going to start charging. And that ended up doing two things.

Mark Lardas (34:33):

One was Morgan started financing the construction of a channel to Houston to use Houston as a seaport. But what was a whole lot easier was to move a lot of his operations to Indianola.

Mark Lardas (34:51):

And so, it was kind of like having the biggest shipping company on the coast decide that your city was the city it wanted to operate out of.

Benjamin Morris (35:08):

And that being one of the absolute major means of commercial transport up and down the Gulf Coast flat out and throughout the entire Caribbean basin, I mean, if you have that company operating out of your harbor, you are bound for the stars, aren't you?

Mark Lardas (35:24):

Yes. And the only thing that threatened them was that Port Lavaca was going to put in a railroad and that would make Port Lavaca a more attractive port.

Mark Lardas (35:37):

Port Lavaca was further up the bay and so what the citizens of Indianola did was finance a railroad to Indianola, which was finished in the mid-1870s.

Mark Lardas (35:52):

And everything was going great. Indianola was going to be the premier port in the state of Texas by oh, 1900 maybe. So, but then-

Benjamin Morris (36:12):

Let me ask you right at this moment because I think this is a really interesting moment not just for narrative tension, but really in terms of urban planning and architecture and what it meant for Gulf Coast settlements to grow into what could be a hostile environment atmospherically and climatically sometimes.

Benjamin Morris (36:35):

What I want to ask you, Mark, is this prior to what happened in 1875, Indianola had been there for 35, 40-ish years and so forth. And taking my cue from that great maritime work of cinematic genius jaws, I'm listening in the soundtrack here for a little bit of a ...

Benjamin Morris (37:00):

And I'm waiting to hear in that 40-year history, had there been any storms along the bay or that stretch of coast that had given anybody an indication of the fury that Gulf of Mexico hurricanes could bring? I mean, had there been any indication of what was coming?

Mark Lardas (37:31):

There was, and there wasn't. There were storms, there were always storms, but the thing that a lot of people miss is the destruction that a hurricane does tends to be fairly narrow.

Mark Lardas (37:45):

Hurricanes aren't atomic bombs, which just wipe out everything. The damage is focused in the area closest to the eye, and it has to be a really powerful storm.

Mark Lardas (38:06):

So, if a hurricane went in on the far side of Lavaca bay, yeah, it would tear up that far side but Indianola would've just gotten some flooding-

Benjamin Morris (38:29):

Outer rain bands, basically. The outer rain bands would've lashed the area, but then moved on fairly quickly even given the bands.

Mark Lardas (38:36):

Yeah, even claiming the middle because the thing about hurricanes is the damage done is proportional to the square of the speed of the wind.

Mark Lardas (38:45):

So, if you're 30-mile an hour winds, you do one damage. 60 miles, you might do two to three times the damage. At 80-mile, 90-mile winds, all of a sudden you're doing 16 times the damage. But it's kind of like a fairly steep hill, and the further away you get, the less the damage.

Mark Lardas (39:15):

So, yeah, they had an idea that hurricanes could be bad. They just didn't know how bad until one made a direct hit on Indianola. And Indianola's problem was compounded because it was an open road stead. There were no barrier islands between Indianola and the Gulf.

Mark Lardas (39:40):

So, when the 1875 hurricane comes roaring in there, it comes in with this just tidal surge that ends up not just flooding the town, but just scouring it and-

Benjamin Morris (40:04):

Yeah, it's a wall of water. I mean, for folks who've never seen it or experienced that, you're looking at a wall of water of millions of gallons that is bearing down upon a flat plane and just sweeping everything that is in front of it, quite literally off its foundations just sweep like a house made of matchstick. And so, very few things can withstand that kind of level of just pure force.

Mark Lardas (40:29):

But the thing is, you don't have to get very far inland for the damage to go down dramatically. I mean, yeah, it's like a hammer blow for anything within five miles of the coast, but then beyond that, you're pretty safe.

Mark Lardas (40:47):

So, while Indianola ended up getting really hammered, Port Lavaca did not. They got hurt, but not to the point where you end up losing most of the town.

Benjamin Morris (41:03):

Yeah. And the first one was bad enough that it resulted in, I mean, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of casualties from this one, weren't we?

Mark Lardas (41:11):

Right. The thing is that after the first one, they told themselves, "Oh, this can't happen again." This is a once in a century thing, and they rebuilt the town, but they didn't do anything to protect the town from another hurricane.

Mark Lardas (41:31):

And then another one came through in 1886, which was just 11 years later. And this was about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Mark Lardas (41:46):

If you live on the Gulf Coast, one of the things you do hope for are some tropical storms early in the season because they suck the heat out of the water of the Gulf. In this case, it did not.

Mark Lardas (42:01):

It was a fairly late storm. It had been a hot, pretty much rainless summer on the Texas coast. And when it went over the outer islands, Haiti, Hispaniola, and Cuba, it hit a Gulf of Mexico that was just filled with energy in hot water. And so, it ended up building into, I think it was a Cat 4 storm.

Mark Lardas (42:33):

Now, the good news was this time, the last storm hit at night and people weren't aware that it was even at hand. And that was why the casualty rate was so high.

Mark Lardas (42:45):

This time people recognized that there was a hurricane in the Gulf and it was heading their way, and they decided that maybe they'd leave town and give the hurricane a little extra room without them to bother it.

Benjamin Morris (43:03):

I've got a reporter friend here in town who whenever we see warm water in the gulf, in the summertime, he just calls that hurricane food. And it's just amazing to see how quickly they can grow in a matter of hours. I mean, even not just days, but hours when they are exposed to that.

Benjamin Morris (43:22):

And a Cat 4 bearing down on a settlement of effectively wood frame houses and shops, I mean, what do you think's going to happen, right?

Mark Lardas (43:29):

And what was worse is if the water wasn't bad enough, there was a signal station there that had a lot of oil in it for the lamps and it got swept off its foundations and the fuel there caught fire and set fire to the rest of the town. So, talk about fire and water simultaneously.

Benjamin Morris (44:00):

Yeah. If it's not one thing, it's another. I tell you what, there was one interesting detail I wanted to ask you about. And I know it's sort of we're compressing a lot of destruction and kind of rebuilding into a short sort of 10 to 12 period here.

Benjamin Morris (44:19):

But there's a detail in one of these storms, which I thought was so interesting, and it's about the courthouse. You mentioned that the courthouse was built differently-

Mark Lardas (44:31):

Concrete construction.

Benjamin Morris (44:31):

That there was still activity in and around it. Concrete, yeah, exactly.

Benjamin Morris (44:34):

And in fact, in one of these storms, there was a trial going on during the hurricane. I mean, so what was happening there?

Mark Lardas (44:42):

The thing people forget is you didn't have the early warning of a hurricane the way we do today. Or even into after 1900, they'd set up a hurricane warning system.

Mark Lardas (44:59):

All they saw were the clouds. And of course, when a hurricane's heading towards you, a lot of times the weather improves from the standpoint of it doesn't rain. Yeah, you've got a nice steady wind, but it's steady and things seemed pretty good.

Mark Lardas (45:23):

And they had a really big murder trial going on, and nobody saw any reason that they should postpone it because it wasn't like it was raining or anything. And until all of a sudden it was. And they ended up trapped in the courthouse, which turned out to be the safest building in the town.

Mark Lardas (45:55):

And ironically, I think it was the defendant ended up leaving the building several time to rescue people that were floating by and drag them back into the courthouse.

Benjamin Morris (46:08):

The guy who was accused of murder goes out and starts saving lives.

Mark Lardas (46:12):

Right. As I recall, the whole trial had to do with a feud that was going on in that county at that time. So, it wasn't pure lawlessness, it was just lawlessness directed against one family by another and vice versa.

Benjamin Morris (46:35):

I mean, did they acquit the guy because he managed to help everybody out? What happened in the aftermath?

Mark Lardas (46:43):

I honestly don't remember. The two accused murderers saved several men. I think they disappeared before the trial could be reconvened, which seems to me-

Benjamin Morris (47:04):

Kind of in the chaos, you mean?

Mark Lardas (47:05):

Yeah. It seems to me a reasonable proposition from the standpoint of those two, because they probably had the opportunity to get away.

Mark Lardas (47:17):

And again, we're talking about a society that doesn't have telephones, doesn't have mass communications. Once you get outside of 50 miles, nobody has heard of you.

Benjamin Morris (47:32):

Yep, yep, yep. And if you can find a horse that's all you need to make your escape.

Mark Lardas (47:39):

Or a railroad.

Benjamin Morris (47:40):

That makes perfect sense.

Mark Lardas (47:40):

Trains go faster.

Benjamin Morris (47:41):

Or a railroad, yep. And you don't have to stop and … well, I guess you do have to feed and water them in a kind of chemical sense, maybe not so much a nutritional sense.

Benjamin Morris (47:55):

So, let me ask you this, Mark, after 1886, the second storm, as you said, was just this kind of perfect blend of terrible, terrible conditions in order to (and I'm so sorry to have to sort of use this metaphor) put the nail in the coffin of the town itself.

Benjamin Morris (48:17):

I mean, people had moved away between the storms, some people had stayed to kind of built back. But this second one, as far as the one two punch goes, the second punch was a knockout punch. It was a TKO.

Mark Lardas (48:29):

It really was because nobody felt safe shipping goods to and from Indianola. More than that, I mean, the people had been through it twice.

Mark Lardas (48:42):

They actually picked up and moved their houses elsewhere. Some to Port Lavaca. Some as far away as Victoria, which is a fairly long way to move a house in a pre-mechanized era.

Benjamin Morris (49:02):

And the state comes in, you write that the state of Texas, actually, it's not just that people abandoned the site, the state of Texas declared Indianola dead.

Mark Lardas (49:17):

Pretty much, although it was kind of like a coroner declaring a body dead.

Benjamin Morris (49:24):

Fair.

Mark Lardas (49:26):

They didn't kill the city so much as they found that it was dead. So, a lot of what had been done, a lot of the shipping move to Port Lavaca.

Mark Lardas (49:39):

But more than that, a lot of it shifted to either Galveston or Corpus Christi. There was a general feeling that it was unsafe to have a port at that particular location.

Benjamin Morris (49:53):

And what's left? What's left when you go there now?

Mark Lardas (50:00):

Not terribly much. You can still see the foundations of the courthouse. Although the coast has shifted and the courthouse is now out in the middle of the water, there is a monument to Indianola if you're going along the coast. And that's pretty much it. Isn't a whole lot there.

Benjamin Morris (50:26):

Yeah. I got curious, and I just sort of plugged it into the computer to see if I could find Indianola on the map if it still turns up. And there were one or two hits on there.

Benjamin Morris (50:43):

One thing that interested me, Mark, was that it's an east facing city. I had thought that it was more of a southerly facing city or was. But just with the particular orientation along the bay there, I mean, that east facing probably got doubly hard hit from the storm.

Benjamin Morris (51:00):

But I will say this, I did find it was not directly in Indianola, but it was kind of maybe a little further down the coast that it looks like there's one marina, which is now operating.

Benjamin Morris (51:12):

And it looks like they got pretty good hamburgers and some decent sized fish in that bayou. So, maybe it's worth going to check it out.

Benjamin Morris (51:20):

But other than that, yeah, it is a lost city. It is under the waves, and it exists pretty much only in our memories and in records like yours.

Mark Lardas (51:36):

And fuzzy photographs.

Benjamin Morris (51:38):

And fuzzy photographs of poorly drawn camels, of course. I have to ask you one quick question before we begin to sort of turn our attention to what you're working on now.

Benjamin Morris (51:54):

But everybody knows about the Galveston storm of 1900. That's one of the most famous destructive, deadly hurricanes in history. It is still, as you write in your chapter on the Galveston storm, the standard by which all other storms are judged, which is a terrible, terrible sort of jewel in one's crown to have to wear.

Benjamin Morris (52:20):

But I'm fascinated by the tension between Indianola and Galveston which is to say they both got hit by incredibly powerful storms at different points in their growth and development. Storms that threatened to wipe them both off the map.

Benjamin Morris (52:41):

And yet Galveston is still here, and Indianola isn't. So, why is that?

Mark Lardas (52:46):

There were a couple reasons why. One is that Galveston realized after the 1900 storm, because Indianola had been hit by two storms in about 12 years, that they could be hit by another storm and that they better do something about it.

Mark Lardas (53:08):

And they ended up putting in a sea wall. And more importantly, they literally raised the town so that it was at least 17 feet above sea level. And it was the largest civil engineering project in the United States right on up to the construction of the Hoover Dam. And it was a massive effort.

Mark Lardas (53:34):

I've got some ghost stories about stuff that resulted from that, including a lost cannon, but we won't go into that right now.

Benjamin Morris (53:46):

Next time. Next time. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Lardas (53:49):

But they literally raised the city and put in the sea wall. And then in 1916, it got hit by a hurricane that was even worse than the 1900 storm.

Mark Lardas (54:04):

But because of the sea wall, it ended up not taking terribly much damage from that one at all. And that hurricane has actually been largely forgotten. Nobody talks about the 1916 hurricane, which proves success is boring.

Benjamin Morris (54:25):

You know what else it proves? It's remarkable actually, Mark, there's that old ade that says those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. This may be one of the very few instances in which somebody actually remembered the past so that they would not repeat it. It’s astounding.

Mark Lardas (54:41):

Right. The other thing is that Galveston had one advantage over Indianola in that its harbor was on the inland side of the barrier island. Whereas Indianola, the port was open to the sea and the city got pushed aside. The strand is on the north side of Galveston Island.

Mark Lardas (55:10):

And so, a hurricane has to batter its way, not just through the sea wall, but through the rest of the island. And since they raised the island, it didn't suffer the same magnitude of destruction in 1916 as it had in 1900.

Mark Lardas (55:34):

And again, that's part of what I'm talking about when I'm saying that the energy of a hurricane tends to drop off exponentially, and you have to pretty much have a bullseye hit to get the amount of damage that you got in Galveston in 1900 or in Indianola in 1875 and 1886.

Mark Lardas (56:01):

But that sea wall and the fact that they raised the island literally preserved Galveston. And yes, Galveston has been hit by hurricane since then, but it's pretty well survived them.

Benjamin Morris (56:21):

Yeah, it's standing okay.

Mark Lardas (56:22):

Yeah. I ended up having to do jury duty in Galveston after Ike, and I swear that it really looked like pictures of bombed out Berlin in 1945 with all the stuff by the side of the road.

Mark Lardas (56:37):

And that's one reason that they're planning on building something called the Ike Dike, which will provide even more protection to Galveston Island, Galveston Bay, and the Port of Houston.

Benjamin Morris (56:54):

Good deal. Good deal. Yeah. We need all the help we can get. And speaking from your neighboring state of Louisiana, we're open to all good ideas and we're trying to implement as many as we can as well.

Mark Lardas (57:10):

Well, it really has to be a bad storm to as hurt New Orleans because New Orleans is fairly well inland, but it can be hurt.

Benjamin Morris (57:20):

It can indeed, as we saw just most recently in Ida a couple years ago, if you get like you said, the right mix of elements and the right angle, the right strength, anything can happen. So, we remain vigilant, shall we say.

Benjamin Morris (57:38):

Let me ask you this, for your book is just so full of interesting accounts like this and really gives such a unique perspective on the depth of history along the Texas coastline. What are you working on now?

Mark Lardas (57:55):

The current book I'm working on is set half a continent away because it is about B-29s and Japanese night fighters in World War II.

Mark Lardas (58:11):

And before that, I had finished a book on US submarines and Japanese aircraft carriers oddly enough that has a Texas connection because one of the submarines involved was the Cavalla, which is preserved in Galveston at Seawolf Park, and just coincidentally happens to be celebrating the 80th anniversary of its launched tomorrow.

Benjamin Morris (58:44):

Yeah. How about that? How about that? That is remarkable. We love a good little coincidence like that. Well, they sound like very productive projects, and we wish you all the best with them.

Benjamin Morris (58:57):

If folks wanted to reach out and get a copy of Vanished Texas Coast or any of your other titles, the Vanished Houston Landmarks, or any of the other histories you've written, what's the best place for them to do that?

Mark Lardas (59:11):

Depends on where they live. The most reliable way that you can get them is either directly from the Arcadia Publishing website or from Amazon. A lot of the local bookstores in Texas carry my books but it's kind of catch-as-catch-can.

Mark Lardas (59:34):

I keep having friends tell me that they see Vanished Texas Coast and Vanished Houston Landmarks in various Walgreens around here, but I've not seen them but they're available. I would go online to get them.

Mark Lardas (59:53):

If you want an autographed copy, Schroeder's Book Haven in League City where I live will sell and ship an autographed copy to somebody.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:07):

That's an offer that we can't refuse. Thank you for that, Mark.

Mark Lardas (01:00:11):

And my website is marklardas.com.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:17):

Perfect. And will you spell that for us?

Mark Lardas (01:00:19):

M-A-R-K-L-A-R-D-A-S.C-O-M.

Benjamin Morris (01:00:25):

Brilliant. Thank you so much. And we really appreciate your making the time for us when you are quite literally involved in figuring out how to get humanity back to the moon. So, we are very grateful on that front and all the best to you in all your endeavors.

Mark Lardas (01:00:46):

Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I enjoyed it.