I was born here in 1939. I got a wonderful education grades 1-6, before our family moved with the company's expanding operations in Beaumont. Here, at age 7, I began piano lessons with the town's only piano teacher, Lila Crow. I played each spring in her recitals at the Club House. That foundation led me eventually to graduate school in Philadelphia, a life-long teaching career at the Philadelphia Musical Academy and the Juilliard School in NY. From the WW II, post-depression era safety of this wonderful community, I went on to become the first composer to make a major work for Moog Synthesizer, and my music is recorded, published, and even in a film by Federico Fellini. I'm about to celebrate my 80th birthday with a concert of my music in NYC, and a presentation of an opera I wrote in June. Last May, at the age of 79, I received an award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, which said in its citation: “Andrew Rudin’s music unfolds complex and tightly constructed narratives that nonetheless feel rhapsodic and have an unfailing sense of lyricism and drama.” You never know where small-town life will lead. This lovely little film brings back such nostalgia. www.composerRudin.com
What your thoughtful film does not show, is that there was a separate "mexican town", for the hispanic workers... little Spanish style adobe homes, in contrast to the white clapboard/slate roof houses for the anglo community . However, we all went to the same school. There were no black workers. And so far as I was aware, the only Jewish family ran one of the grocery stores in town. There was a red-brick Baptist church, a white frame Methodist church near the elementary school an hospital, and a library stood between them.
My grandfather would tell me stories how they lived in area where all the hispanics lived and his father worked at the sulfur plant back in the 1920's and 1930's . He also told me that his father would make homemade brew there.
I was born in New Gulf in 1971, my grandfather worked in Old Gulf, then was moved to New Gulf. I have fond memories of that place. Caught my first catfish in the reservoir, my dad snuck me on the engine train and rode me around for a little bit. My grandfather, father and uncles all worked out there.. my grandmother ran a small snow cone stand out of her house...
@@19keke80 Old Gulf was near the coastal town of Matagorda. My dad was born there in 1929 & moved with his family to New Gulf in Wharton county in the mid thirties. My grandfather was employed by TGS as a weighmaster.
My family history is here. My grandfather worked in that machine shop at that sulphur plant until retirement. My grandmother taught 20+ years at that school until also retiring. They were married at that baptist church. My mother was born in that hospital. She and I both attended that school. Even my school dances were in that club house. My grandfather used to drive me around that golfcourse in his golf cart (we even played golf together once) and play dominoes in the building next door when it rained. This video shows nothing of the suffering the residents went through when the sulphur company was bought out and closed by a competiting company, forcing all the residents to leave the community, their neighbors, and life. Newgulf is heartbreaking. Imagine not having just your health insurance tied into your job, but your home and all your neighbors homes, your entire community and way of life, with everything that entails.
My grandfather and all his siblings were raised in New Gulf. There father worked at the sulfur plant his name was i think Abelario Hernandez my grandfather told me that they lived in an area where all the hispanics lived and his dad would make home made brew. this all took place back in the 1920,s and 1930,s.
I use to live there for many years till we had to leave when the company shut down. My dad,brother and many other relatives worked there in the plant. Have many fond memories growing up there.✌️
As one of the ones that has lived in that little town and you got I was born in August 3, 1948 and one of seven children that was born in new golf my parents originally from Goliad Texas and we all move there a lot of our cousins moved there also it was a neat little town in the schools were fantastic we live through a lot of hurricanes but doing the people that took care of us by providing his housing and people to take care of the houses but we still paid rent it was a great little town we danced at the clubhouse we celebrated birthdays we celebrated graduation
My grandfather helped build the two tall masonry smoke stacks at the sulphur company in Newgulf. My dad worked in the sulphur industry too, first in nearby Orchard, then in west Texas. Thanks for making this video so I can learn more information related to family history.
I was born in 1999 I'm 21 right now and I'm there all the time I've went to school in newgulf I've been to the stacks I've been in the buildings over there its cool to actually see what is was like I've heard story's from my dad and grandpa of how it was back then I even took my graduation pictures there in 2018
I grew up in Needville but I remember this town mostly the smell of sulfur. I remember the big sinkhole that happened in the early 80's not too far from there as well. The memories
This video is great. I went in high school in 2008 and went in one of the houses, it was just unlocked. I think they are tearing them down if they haven’t.
The sulphur company was bought out by Elf Aquitaine who was then bought out by TotalEnegies which is still running today and is a successful petroleum company.. Well I think 🤔? But please correct me if l am wrong 👍
In the early 90's our house burned down in Markham, we tore that one down and my mom bought and moved one of the New Gulf over to Markham where she lived until she retired to Brenham. Thank You for covering it.
Why does Amerika seem to have a lot of abandoned towns and sectors of major cities obliterated? Oh, we relied upon industrialists for the welfare of the people.
I recognize those smokestacks from Newgulf, TX. When I was a little kid in the early 70's, one of my earliest memories was how the house shook from the drilling and activities over in the sulfur fields 8 miles away. The house shook night and day; so much so that lock chain on the inside of the door swayed back and forth enough to cut a deep groove into the wood of the door jamb trim. We had a lot of neighbors that worked or had worked out at TG (Texas Gulf Sulfur Company). One was my granddad's best friend; he had worked as a roughneck and in his younger days as a bricklayer building the two huge smokestack chimneys still there to this day and visible in the distance from our farm west of Needville. In the 50's and 60's, Newgulf was a nice "company town" with a theater, cafes, and a hospital. In fact one of Dad's first cousins died in the Newgulf hospital... he was a Marine veteran of Korea, and gotten severe PTSD from his experiences at the Chosin Reservoir, and at the time there was very little known about PTSD and virtually nothing on how to treat it. He was a young man, but drank heavily and his young wife Marilyn learned to wake him up with a broomstick when he started having nightmares because he came up swinging. He was drinking and rolled his 57 Chevy upside down in a ditch and was trapped under the car, and his brother working in a nearby cotton field saw it happen and ran over and somehow lifted the car off him to get him out. He was in the hospital a few days and apparently recovered; he called his parents (my grandmother's sister and her husband) to drive over and pick him up because he was being released. When they arrived a half-hour later, the hospital told them he had died, apparently of a blood clot that broke loose. Dad told me stories about when he was a teenager going over to Newgulf to the theater and cafe on dates in the late 50's and early 60's. By the time I was a kid in the 70's, I remember the trains hauling liquid sulfur from the TG plant... They had abandoned the earlier "sulfur block" transportation methods seen here, in favor of pumping liquid sulfur into small "half length" railroad tank cars with heater coils in them (when hooked up to steam lines at the receiving point, the high temperature steam would reheat the sulfur and melt any sulfur that had solidified on the inside of the tank car. I remember well on our frequent trips to Wharton through Boling, the next town over across the San Bernard River from Needville, we'd often get stopped at the railroad crossing in downtown Boling, or at the "S" crossing in Iago where the highway crossed from the west side of the tracks to the east side all the way into Wharton, or through the couple of crossings in the middle of Wharton that divided the small city. I remember most of the time we'd be driving on the main highway paralleling the tracks and watching the stubby little tank cars "wig-wagging" rocking back and forth as they rolled down the tracks... some in unison making "waves" that traveled up and down the length of the train, partway anyhow, interrupted once in awhile by a car (or sometimes a few) either not rocking at all, or rocking in directly opposite directions from each other. Some cars didn't rock at all, some a little, and some rocked SO violently back and forth you swore they were gonna pitch completely over off the tracks at any moment. But accidents were few and far between... there IS a spot between Glen Flora and Eagle Lake where a sulfur car derailed and split open, and dumped its cargo of liquid sulfur on the ground beside the tracks. There has been a dead spot where nothing would grow for the last about 50 years, though it is starting to disappear-- I guess the sulfur has finally been leached away by the heavy rainfall we often get in the winter, spring, and fall over the years so the soil is no longer completely toxic. It can be seen here as a triangular spot near the center of the map, alongside the trees growing on the old railroad right-of-way; the tracks were pulled up decades ago... www.google.com/maps/@29.4492881,-96.2808038,264m/data=!3m1!1e3 To be continued... OL J R :)
Our neighbor, Frank Fojtik, told stories of the old days at TG... he said one time the ground simply opened up, swallowed an entire drilling rig, including all the roughnecks working on the rig, and the equipment, dropped them all into the hole, and closed up again. They never found any of them... I largely discounted this story until the Boling sinkhole opened up in the early 1980's one night, creating a water-filled pit over 150 feet deep and half the size of a football field, and closing FM 442 between Boling and Needville for well over a year, forcing everyone to divert on the small country gravel roads between the local farms in the area... The Boling sinkhole was eventually pumped out and filled in with dirt, and repaved over, but it has continued to settle over the years and went from being a small mound to a low spot in the road... It's visible on the map here... www.google.com/maps/@29.2961933,-95.9123755,216m/data=!3m1!1e3 It was in the middle of the road extending from inside the corner of the pasture corner post on the LH side nearly to the trees on the RH side of the road. In fact the subsidence can be seen in the arc of green grass across the pasture to the left-- the pasture sloped down into the hole nearly from the front yard of the brick home just behind the small pasture-- had the sinkhole been any larger it might well have collapsed into it. Two vehicles ran off into it during the night, but luckily for both drivers they managed to swim out of their rapidly sinking vehicles (IIRC they were both pickups, and very few pickups in the early 1980's had air conditioning, even in SE TX, so their windows were down to let the cooling breeze in as they drove). Initial estimates placed the hole at up to 700 feet deep, but it was impossible to tell because it was filled with water. My parents both drove that road to and from work, Dad at the nuclear plant they were building near Bay City, mom to the Wharton hospital where she was an ER night clerk and bookkeeper. He also told stories about being a bricklayer building the two enormous smokestacks out there and some of their history afterwards. At some point, not sure of the year, but in the 50's or early 60's, some weekend pilot decided to fly his Piper cub size plane BETWEEN the two smokestacks... he made his first pass successfully passing between them, and circled around to do it again to the cheering workers watching from the ground... on the next pass, however, at the last moment his plane was caught by a gust of wind that blew his plane over heading directly for one of the smokestacks, and he collided with it... his plane collapsed like a crushed pop can and ignited, and slid down the smokestack to the bottom into a heap of burning wreckage. Of course he was killed but no serious injuries or damage was sustained on the ground... To be continued... OL J R :)
I remember well my Grandpa had a bank account in nearby Boling, and borrowed money for the farm there most years. His checks used to have the bank's emblem on it (which banks used to have back in the 70's when they were all independent, before they were all bought out and merged in the late 80's and 90's into huge conglomeration "bank chains" like we have now... same way all the hospitals were bought out in the 80's by the big mega-chain hospital corporations like HCA... which created the huge faceless corporations we have now that mistreat employees and customers alike). Their bank emblem was a stalk of grain sorghum, an ear of corn, and an open cotton boll surrounding a bull (representing the 3 major crops and livestock of the area) in front of an angled drawing of the huge block of sulfur with the iconic twin smokestacks of TG in the background. By the late 70's though TG was nearly out of business-- trains of sulfur dwindled from daily to weekly at most, and then stopped altogether. I remember when I was a kid we sometimes drove out to Newgulf via the entrance on the north side off of FM 442 a couple miles east of Boling. It's the road to the south (RH side of the screen) visible at the middle of the screen here on this map... www.google.com/maps/@29.2782896,-95.93487,556m/data=!3m1!1e3 The 2 lane highway went back a couple miles through and along the edge of the old sulfur field and came right past the plant, and turned slightly into the entrance to the town of Newgulf. The road was closed and a big locked gate put across the entrance off of FM 442 in the 70's because of subsidence in the old sulfur field had opened large holes and cracked the roadway badly and it was felt to be "too unsafe" for traffic. After that everybody had to come and go from the west road out of Newgulf to the main highway down to Pledger from Boling, FM 1301. Since that was greatly out of the way for us, and Newgulf by that point was basically dead (a lot of the old company wood-frame houses were being sold and moved all over the area by house-movers and set up as homes for people moving into the surrounding areas) but the hospital, cafes, and movie theater were all LONG gone by that point... most of them had disappeared in the late 60's or very early 70's. Now Newgulf is all but abandoned-- a small enclave of homes built later now line streets adjoining the east side of the old "company town", which now consists of tree-lined abandoned paved streets criss-crossing in what is now largely abandoned lots, the houses having been sold and moved off decades ago. Most of the old factory works are abandoned in place-- whatever could be reasonably scrapped were sold for scrap decades ago. I remember as a teenager we went out there and bought some hay from the farmer who was leasing the old well field to bale hay. The grounds were criss-crossed by the pipelines to and from the main plant where the hot water was created and sent out through pipes to the wells, and hot sulfur returned from the wells. I remember the pipelines all ran on racks above ground, about waist high, and passed through enormous culverts where they crossed under the roads. The pipes were insulated with something (probably asbestos as it was widely used in industrial insulation at the time it was all built) and covered with aluminum sheet wrapped around over it. We were loading hay in the field and I saw a pipe leaking steam from a pinhole, and there was a large pile of blocks of sulfur on the ground around it. The pinhole leak was evidently weeping sulfur-rich hot water, which was flashing off into steam, and leaving a large stalactite of condensed sulfur hanging off the pipes down toward the ground. Periodically they sent someone out with a sledge hammer to break off the concretions of sulfur off the pipe, so it didn't build up to the point it weighed down the pipes so much that it broke the pipe. They just left the broken pieces of sulfur laying around... I picked one up and dropped it in the bed of the pickup-- I still have it all these years later as part of my rock collection. All the piping was removed decades ago as well, along with their insulation. To be continued... OL J R :)
Now the old sulfur field is dominated by a huge subsidence lake... over the decades, the ground has sunk from the removal of the sulfur deep underground that was supporting the layers of the Earth above, and created a lake on the surface... You can see it here on the maps... www.google.com/maps/@29.2742886,-95.9014912,841m/data=!3m1!1e3 You can clearly see some of the old sulfur well field roads that lead out into the lake where the ground sank from under them... there's even power lines and old oil storage tanks out in the middle of the lake, that were once on dry land until the ground sank from under them and the lake formed up around them. It's rather remarkable to see. There are two subsidence lakes next to each other, separated by a narrow strip of land, and the old main reservoir is the roughly square construction visible to the southwest. A similar subsidence lake formed out on my old bus route when I drove a school bus, near the old Jefferson Lake sulfur plant east of Guy, TX... it's visible here... www.google.com/maps/@29.3841296,-95.7219009,2964m/data=!3m1!1e3 The plant there is completely gone, only the lake remains, though they've opened a landfill just to the east of it, which is visible on the satellite image. Just across from Long Point road running west to Guy, you can see the tree-lined old railroad right of way that used to be used by the trains carrying sulfur out of the plant-- trains were pushed and pulled back west from the Jefferson Lake plant to the turning wye on the other side of the main highway (state highway 36), where the trains turned 90 degrees through the wye and then headed back north through the countryside and eventually through downtown Needville on their way northward to join the main tracks outside Rosenberg-Richmond, where they could travel to Houston to the refineries and the Houston Ship Channel to be loaded onto freighters or south to Galveston to the Port to be loaded onto ships there, like the sulfur from TG. Jefferson Lake was closed down WAY before my time though... Back in the early 00's (IIRC) a company came and started generating electric power by tapping into the huge reservoir of superheated water that remains down in the sulfur formation deep underground... the Earth itself has insulated the superheated water all these decades and so the water has remained at about almost 300 degrees F, so they can pump that hot water to the surface, and use it to boil steam to spin a turbine, a process known as "co-generation' that makes use of waste heat from industrial plants and such. Doing this recaptures some of the energy burned in fuel to heat the water decades ago when the sulfur was being mined, then the cooler water is pumped back down to the bottom of the formation. It's the only remaining industrial activity at the site. It's a shame... I'll have to shoot a video down in Newgulf some time... all that remains are a few nicer more modern homes and Newgulf Elementary School, whose students tranfer to Boling ISD to attend high school and junior high. Later! OL J R :)
@@scottsimpson5223 Well dunno where you lived but I PROMISE you our house trembled enough constantly for the chain to wear a slot clean through the door trim beside the door when I was a kid. Maybe you lived in a different area where the ground was more stable, just means you were in a different area than I was not that what I said was BS. Of course being an inconsiderate @ss, I guess maybe you couldn't figure that much out for yourself. Have a good one! OL J R :)
On hot summer evenings we used to go out for a sunset drive along the road atop the levee that bounded one of the reservoirs. It was adjacent to a wonderful park with picnic tables, baseball diamond etc. Here we went to Boy Scout camp. And we learned to swim by a pier constructed in the reservoir.
One of those bodies of water is the TGS reservoir. This was used for steam generation to melt the sulphur to make it flow to the surface. The other one is the flooded sulphur field after the levee surrounding the sulphur field broke and let the San Bernard River in.
Subsidence lakes... all the sulfur that was taken out of the ground far below that was holding up the land above it... over the decades the ground settled and filled with water, now it's an enormous lake. You can see it clearly in google Earth or on maps here... www.google.com/maps/@29.269726,-95.9012974,2967m/data=!3m1!1e3 You can clearly see the two greenish lakes to the top and left of the map, separated by a small tongue of land. The reservoir is the large lighter colored brownish sorta square looking lake to the southwest, which is clearly constructed to hold water for the plant. If you zoom in on the subsidence lake, you can clearly see where the old well field roads that went out to the wells from which the sulfur was pumped have sunk into the lake as the ground sank beneath them. There's even big steel liquid holding tanks out in the middle of the lake, that were once on dry land, where the ground has sunk under them into the lake... there's even a power line crossing the lake where it was built on dry land that has since sunk to become lake bottom. The lake isn't very deep but continues sinking... Back in the 70's they closed the old north entrance-- there used to be a 2 lane highway that went from the old main plant (smokestacks) and the entrance to Newgulf (town itself) and connected up with FM 442 just a couple miles east of Boling. They closed this road due to subsidence and cracking and sinking of parts of the road and it being "too unsafe for travel". That leaves only the road heading west out of Newgulf a couple miles to FM 1301 to connect what's left of the town with Boling a few miles north or Pledger several miles south. I grew up on our farm west of Needville just on the other side of the San Bernard river, in Fort Bend county... we went past there A LOT going to and from Boling on our way to our other farm at Shiner 90 miles west in Lavaca county. Dad used to tell stories about going to the movies out at the theater in Newgulf and eating at the cafe on dates and stuff when he was a high schooler in the mid-60's. I vividly remember the sulfur trains with their stubby half-length rail cars hauling liquid sulfur out of the plant in the early-mid 70's... they had abandoned the process shown here of making the enormous block of sulfur and then breaking it up and loading the crushed sulfur solids into railroad gondola cars, in favor of just pumping the liquid sulfur into rail tank cars with heater coils on them... they'd stay hot enough for the trip due to the sheer mass of sulfur I suppose and if any DID solidify inside the car, the cars were equipped with heating coils inside the tanks that they could hook up to superheated steam to melt the sulfur out of the cars anyway. The train cars were VERY short compared to typical railroad tank cars, like those we see today, since sulfur was twice as heavy as water, thus the cars could be much smaller and still have the railroad wheelsets and axles (trucks) loaded to capacity. I remember those short little cars used to wig-wag back and forth something awful, rocking back and forth to and fro as they rolled down the tracks, some so bad they looked like they were about to flip completely off the tracks... some hardly wiggled at all and some make "waves" that rocked in staggered unison, like a rope whipped back and forth... then you'd see a car or few that wouldn't wiggle at all, then usually another car that would rock in time completely opposite of the others... it was weird and mesmerizing... I'd watch the trains go through Boling when we got caught at the crossing or at the angled crossing cutting across 1301 in nearby Iago, and the tracks paralleled 1301 almost all the way into Wharton, so I could watch the train as we passed it most of the way to Wharton... By the late 70's the trainloads of sulfur fell off from daily or nearly so to about once a week, then less and less and finally stopped altogether. They ripped the tracks out in the mid-80's or so when I was in high school IIRC. In the early 80's, they had a huge sinkhole open up in the middle of FM 442 connecting Needville to Boling, so my parents had to go to work and we had to go to Shiner detouring through gravel roads through the surrounding farms for a couple years til they could pump it dry and refill it with dirt and pave a new road over it. That was in early 1982 IIRC and I remember two vehicles ran off into it in the darkness, since it collapsed at night. Luckily for the drivers most pickups back then didn't have air conditioning so they had their windows down, and they managed to swim out of their rapidly sinking vehicles. I remember when it first happened they said they thought the hole could be as deep as 750 feet, but they started pumping it dry and in a month or so they had it pumped out, and it was only about 100 feet deep, the pickups and broken pavement still resting on the bottom. They think that sulfur or other stuff pumped out from down there created a void that slowly collapsed, the roof caving off and settling to the bottom, until over time it rose to the surface like a bubble in a swimming pool... eventually the final layers of earth above the hole collapsed into it and created the sinkhole. Sure was glad when they filled it in and repaved the road over it, and we could again take the main highway, as it cut ten minutes off the trip even going 8 miles from our house to Boling, or anywhere else further west (like Wharton or Shiner). Later! OL J R :)
There was a reservoir built to service the company, since superheated water and steam were used to melt the sulfur out of the ground (what was known as the Frosch method). I first learned to swim in that reservoir during cub scout camp the the public park nearby.
This is really awesome! My mom grew up in Ganado, and we always stopped near here on our way there. ETA... I would guess that the growth is a continuation of Houston white flight. Katy, Tomball, Rosenberg, New Caney Mont Belvieu...all no longer that small anymore.
Used to be a VERY common procedure in mining... and other remote resource extraction worksites. The "coal towns" of West Virginia come to mind, or the "lumber camps" of the Piney Woods of East Texas or the upper northwest. Lot of old "oil towns" and stuff too over the years. People didn't have much choice-- you went where the work was, and the "company housing" was usually much better than you could have afforded to build on your own, and when the resources dried up and the town died, you weren't left with a house in the middle of nowhere and no work nearby to make a living... so it wasn't ALL bad... I remember as a kid on my old school bus route in the mid-late 70's, there used to be a large natural gas pipeline compressor plant about five miles from our farm... The bus drove down there and dropped off and picked up about probably 8-12 kids back then... The compressor station serviced three 36 inch gas pipelines and had four HUGE compressors running 24 hours a day... they sucked the gas out of the pipeline and raised the pressure to about 540 PSI to "boost" the pressure and thus the amount of gas the pipelines could carry, from the gas well fields west of El Campo, TX that carried the gas to the refineries and ship channel in Houston. They had a single almost half-mile long street entering the plant grounds, lined with "company housing" rented to the workers, and then an office and warehouse and the compressor buildings themselves, a shop for mechanic work that went on there, etc. The laws changed in the late 70's and they could no longer run as high a pressure in the pipelines, so they didn't need the compressor station any longer, and almost everyone lost their jobs. All the families moved away and the houses were almost all sold, except for a couple houses down closest to the plant itself, which remained as the office and the other as the worker's "break room" and bathrooms. I worked down there one year right after high school, doing right of way mowing, since I was a farm kid and knew how to run tractors and equipment. That was our main job, we had an on-site ROW maintenance boss and his secretary in the "main office" and a pipeline locating guy who would go mark and monitor the pipeline whenever any other businesses or municipalities were digging across or under or over the pipeline, to make sure they did it correctly and didn't hit or rupture the pipelines. The rest of us were in maintenance and ROW mowing. One time I DID get to go into the old compressor house-- the compressor engines themselves were impressive-- like giant ship engines, the crankcases were bolted to the floor and had huge rectangular manhole plates along their length to allow guys to crawl inside to do repairs like install new bearings in the engines. The cast iron cylinders were bolted on top, 24 of them IIRC, and they housed pistons about the size of five gallon buckets. The cylinder heads were about 3 feet in diameter and about a foot and a half thick, cast iron, lifted in place by an overhead crane, and bolted down. I still have an old valve from the engine that I was given when we were cleaning junk out of the warehouse-- it's about a foot long or so and about 4 inches in diameter, like a gigantic version of the valves you'd have in a lawnmower engine or your car engine. On the RH side of the compressor engines in the middle were the gas compressors-- huge 4 foot diameter rounded housings for a giant piston, capped with a valve plate and cylinder head. The valve plate was a circle divided in two, with hundreds of about 1 inch diameter tapered holes drilled in them, half from one side, and half from the other. Into these holes were inserted conical plastic poppet valves with coil springs behind them, the top half facing toward the piston, the bottom half away. The cylinder head was also divided in half, with the top half being the gas inlet into the compressor from the pipeline coming from El Campo, and the bottom half going back to the pipeline going to Houston. Gas went through the poppets from the pipeline into the piston cylinder, then was compressed and forced out the other poppet valves into the pipeline at higher pressure. We did maintenance and cut rights-of-way, but a couple of years later they closed the site completely and then tore down the compressor station. It's just an empty field now, rented for growing hay, and of course the pipeline pig traps and other pipeline crossovers and stuff in the old basement of the compressor station. Later! OL J R :)
No. It was a wonderful place to live, with well cared-for houses, good schools and a lively downtown. The company leased us our 2 bedroom house for $14 a month (back in the 1940's), and painted it outside and inside every 3 or 4 years, furnishing summer employment to high-school boys. It was a great place to grow up and gave me a foundation that eventually led me to an Ivy League education and a successful career as a teacher and composer in Philadelphia and New York City.
yeah? tell Pittsburg that. And Flint Michigan. How about little towns with coal mines. How about Baytown, Texas? It was a company oil. town. How about Silver mining company towns? You didn't major in business history, did ya "Maunster"?
Nice video! Just a minor critique that sometimes (not always), your voice tends to taper out towards the end of your sentences, making the last few words harder to understand.
I was born here in 1939. I got a wonderful education grades 1-6, before our family moved with the company's expanding operations in Beaumont. Here, at age 7, I began piano lessons with the town's only piano teacher, Lila Crow. I played each spring in her recitals at the Club House. That foundation led me eventually to graduate school in Philadelphia, a life-long teaching career at the Philadelphia Musical Academy and the Juilliard School in NY. From the WW II, post-depression era safety of this wonderful community, I went on to become the first composer to make a major work for Moog Synthesizer, and my music is recorded, published, and even in a film by Federico Fellini. I'm about to celebrate my 80th birthday with a concert of my music in NYC, and a presentation of an opera I wrote in June. Last May, at the age of 79, I received an award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, which said in its citation: “Andrew Rudin’s music unfolds complex and tightly constructed narratives that nonetheless feel rhapsodic and have an unfailing sense of lyricism and drama.” You never know where small-town life will lead. This lovely little film brings back such nostalgia. www.composerRudin.com
This just brought tears to my eyes. :) Congratulations on all of the success you have had in your life! Small town, sentimental feelings.
My dad was born here to his name is Edmund samora
U know Nieves Samora
What your thoughtful film does not show, is that there was a separate "mexican town", for the hispanic workers... little Spanish style adobe homes, in contrast to the white clapboard/slate roof houses for the anglo community . However, we all went to the same school. There were no black workers. And so far as I was aware, the only Jewish family ran one of the grocery stores in town. There was a red-brick Baptist church, a white frame Methodist church near the elementary school an hospital, and a library stood between them.
My grandfather would tell me stories how they lived in area where all the hispanics lived and his father worked at the sulfur plant back in the 1920's and 1930's . He also told me that his father would make homemade brew there.
I was born in New Gulf in 1971, my grandfather worked in Old Gulf, then was moved to New Gulf. I have fond memories of that place. Caught my first catfish in the reservoir, my dad snuck me on the engine train and rode me around for a little bit. My grandfather, father and uncles all worked out there.. my grandmother ran a small snow cone stand out of her house...
Larry Quijas my dad was born in 1979 he is a Samora
We know u ur sister is baby dal
Where is old gulf?
@@19keke80 Matagorda
@@19keke80 Old Gulf was near the coastal town of Matagorda. My dad was born there in 1929 & moved with his family to New Gulf in Wharton county in the mid thirties. My grandfather was employed by TGS as a weighmaster.
My family history is here. My grandfather worked in that machine shop at that sulphur plant until retirement. My grandmother taught 20+ years at that school until also retiring. They were married at that baptist church. My mother was born in that hospital. She and I both attended that school. Even my school dances were in that club house. My grandfather used to drive me around that golfcourse in his golf cart (we even played golf together once) and play dominoes in the building next door when it rained.
This video shows nothing of the suffering the residents went through when the sulphur company was bought out and closed by a competiting company, forcing all the residents to leave the community, their neighbors, and life.
Newgulf is heartbreaking. Imagine not having just your health insurance tied into your job, but your home and all your neighbors homes, your entire community and way of life, with everything that entails.
My grandfather and all his siblings were raised in New Gulf. There father worked at the sulfur plant his name was i think Abelario Hernandez my grandfather told me that they lived in an area where all the hispanics lived and his dad would make home made brew. this all took place back in the 1920,s and 1930,s.
I use to live there for many years till we had to leave when the company shut down. My dad,brother and many other relatives worked there in the plant. Have many fond memories growing up there.✌️
As one of the ones that has lived in that little town and you got I was born in August 3, 1948 and one of seven children that was born in new golf my parents originally from Goliad Texas and we all move there a lot of our cousins moved there also it was a neat little town in the schools were fantastic we live through a lot of hurricanes but doing the people that took care of us by providing his housing and people to take care of the houses but we still paid rent it was a great little town we danced at the clubhouse we celebrated birthdays we celebrated graduation
My grandfather helped build the two tall masonry smoke stacks at the sulphur company in Newgulf. My dad worked in the sulphur industry too, first in nearby Orchard, then in west Texas. Thanks for making this video so I can learn more information related to family history.
I was born in 1999 I'm 21 right now and I'm there all the time I've went to school in newgulf I've been to the stacks I've been in the buildings over there its cool to actually see what is was like I've heard story's from my dad and grandpa of how it was back then I even took my graduation pictures there in 2018
I grew up in Needville but I remember this town mostly the smell of sulfur. I remember the big sinkhole that happened in the early 80's not too far from there as well. The memories
This video is great. I went in high school in 2008 and went in one of the houses, it was just unlocked. I think they are tearing them down if they haven’t.
Last time I was there it looked like a lot of them were rental houses. Still some vacant. Need to make my way back down there.
My dad was born here his name is Edmund Samora
Lamento saber que la texas sulphur close dors.tuve contactos en esta em
Presa 1958.was.in your.moments a in
Teresting.corporatio. very.sorry.
The sulphur company was bought out by Elf Aquitaine who was then bought out by TotalEnegies which is still running today and is a successful petroleum company..
Well I think 🤔? But please correct me if l am wrong 👍
In the early 90's our house burned down in Markham, we tore that one down and my mom bought and moved one of the New Gulf over to Markham where she lived until she retired to Brenham. Thank You for covering it.
That close to Houston someone should investigate the possibility of turning that runway into a dragstrip.
Why does Amerika seem to have a lot of abandoned towns and sectors of major cities obliterated? Oh, we relied upon industrialists for the welfare of the people.
I recognize those smokestacks from Newgulf, TX. When I was a little kid in the early 70's, one of my earliest memories was how the house shook from the drilling and activities over in the sulfur fields 8 miles away. The house shook night and day; so much so that lock chain on the inside of the door swayed back and forth enough to cut a deep groove into the wood of the door jamb trim. We had a lot of neighbors that worked or had worked out at TG (Texas Gulf Sulfur Company). One was my granddad's best friend; he had worked as a roughneck and in his younger days as a bricklayer building the two huge smokestack chimneys still there to this day and visible in the distance from our farm west of Needville. In the 50's and 60's, Newgulf was a nice "company town" with a theater, cafes, and a hospital. In fact one of Dad's first cousins died in the Newgulf hospital... he was a Marine veteran of Korea, and gotten severe PTSD from his experiences at the Chosin Reservoir, and at the time there was very little known about PTSD and virtually nothing on how to treat it. He was a young man, but drank heavily and his young wife Marilyn learned to wake him up with a broomstick when he started having nightmares because he came up swinging. He was drinking and rolled his 57 Chevy upside down in a ditch and was trapped under the car, and his brother working in a nearby cotton field saw it happen and ran over and somehow lifted the car off him to get him out. He was in the hospital a few days and apparently recovered; he called his parents (my grandmother's sister and her husband) to drive over and pick him up because he was being released. When they arrived a half-hour later, the hospital told them he had died, apparently of a blood clot that broke loose. Dad told me stories about when he was a teenager going over to Newgulf to the theater and cafe on dates in the late 50's and early 60's.
By the time I was a kid in the 70's, I remember the trains hauling liquid sulfur from the TG plant... They had abandoned the earlier "sulfur block" transportation methods seen here, in favor of pumping liquid sulfur into small "half length" railroad tank cars with heater coils in them (when hooked up to steam lines at the receiving point, the high temperature steam would reheat the sulfur and melt any sulfur that had solidified on the inside of the tank car. I remember well on our frequent trips to Wharton through Boling, the next town over across the San Bernard River from Needville, we'd often get stopped at the railroad crossing in downtown Boling, or at the "S" crossing in Iago where the highway crossed from the west side of the tracks to the east side all the way into Wharton, or through the couple of crossings in the middle of Wharton that divided the small city. I remember most of the time we'd be driving on the main highway paralleling the tracks and watching the stubby little tank cars "wig-wagging" rocking back and forth as they rolled down the tracks... some in unison making "waves" that traveled up and down the length of the train, partway anyhow, interrupted once in awhile by a car (or sometimes a few) either not rocking at all, or rocking in directly opposite directions from each other. Some cars didn't rock at all, some a little, and some rocked SO violently back and forth you swore they were gonna pitch completely over off the tracks at any moment. But accidents were few and far between... there IS a spot between Glen Flora and Eagle Lake where a sulfur car derailed and split open, and dumped its cargo of liquid sulfur on the ground beside the tracks. There has been a dead spot where nothing would grow for the last about 50 years, though it is starting to disappear-- I guess the sulfur has finally been leached away by the heavy rainfall we often get in the winter, spring, and fall over the years so the soil is no longer completely toxic. It can be seen here as a triangular spot near the center of the map, alongside the trees growing on the old railroad right-of-way; the tracks were pulled up decades ago... www.google.com/maps/@29.4492881,-96.2808038,264m/data=!3m1!1e3
To be continued... OL J R :)
Our neighbor, Frank Fojtik, told stories of the old days at TG... he said one time the ground simply opened up, swallowed an entire drilling rig, including all the roughnecks working on the rig, and the equipment, dropped them all into the hole, and closed up again. They never found any of them... I largely discounted this story until the Boling sinkhole opened up in the early 1980's one night, creating a water-filled pit over 150 feet deep and half the size of a football field, and closing FM 442 between Boling and Needville for well over a year, forcing everyone to divert on the small country gravel roads between the local farms in the area... The Boling sinkhole was eventually pumped out and filled in with dirt, and repaved over, but it has continued to settle over the years and went from being a small mound to a low spot in the road... It's visible on the map here... www.google.com/maps/@29.2961933,-95.9123755,216m/data=!3m1!1e3 It was in the middle of the road extending from inside the corner of the pasture corner post on the LH side nearly to the trees on the RH side of the road. In fact the subsidence can be seen in the arc of green grass across the pasture to the left-- the pasture sloped down into the hole nearly from the front yard of the brick home just behind the small pasture-- had the sinkhole been any larger it might well have collapsed into it. Two vehicles ran off into it during the night, but luckily for both drivers they managed to swim out of their rapidly sinking vehicles (IIRC they were both pickups, and very few pickups in the early 1980's had air conditioning, even in SE TX, so their windows were down to let the cooling breeze in as they drove). Initial estimates placed the hole at up to 700 feet deep, but it was impossible to tell because it was filled with water. My parents both drove that road to and from work, Dad at the nuclear plant they were building near Bay City, mom to the Wharton hospital where she was an ER night clerk and bookkeeper.
He also told stories about being a bricklayer building the two enormous smokestacks out there and some of their history afterwards. At some point, not sure of the year, but in the 50's or early 60's, some weekend pilot decided to fly his Piper cub size plane BETWEEN the two smokestacks... he made his first pass successfully passing between them, and circled around to do it again to the cheering workers watching from the ground... on the next pass, however, at the last moment his plane was caught by a gust of wind that blew his plane over heading directly for one of the smokestacks, and he collided with it... his plane collapsed like a crushed pop can and ignited, and slid down the smokestack to the bottom into a heap of burning wreckage. Of course he was killed but no serious injuries or damage was sustained on the ground...
To be continued... OL J R :)
I remember well my Grandpa had a bank account in nearby Boling, and borrowed money for the farm there most years. His checks used to have the bank's emblem on it (which banks used to have back in the 70's when they were all independent, before they were all bought out and merged in the late 80's and 90's into huge conglomeration "bank chains" like we have now... same way all the hospitals were bought out in the 80's by the big mega-chain hospital corporations like HCA... which created the huge faceless corporations we have now that mistreat employees and customers alike). Their bank emblem was a stalk of grain sorghum, an ear of corn, and an open cotton boll surrounding a bull (representing the 3 major crops and livestock of the area) in front of an angled drawing of the huge block of sulfur with the iconic twin smokestacks of TG in the background.
By the late 70's though TG was nearly out of business-- trains of sulfur dwindled from daily to weekly at most, and then stopped altogether. I remember when I was a kid we sometimes drove out to Newgulf via the entrance on the north side off of FM 442 a couple miles east of Boling. It's the road to the south (RH side of the screen) visible at the middle of the screen here on this map... www.google.com/maps/@29.2782896,-95.93487,556m/data=!3m1!1e3 The 2 lane highway went back a couple miles through and along the edge of the old sulfur field and came right past the plant, and turned slightly into the entrance to the town of Newgulf. The road was closed and a big locked gate put across the entrance off of FM 442 in the 70's because of subsidence in the old sulfur field had opened large holes and cracked the roadway badly and it was felt to be "too unsafe" for traffic. After that everybody had to come and go from the west road out of Newgulf to the main highway down to Pledger from Boling, FM 1301. Since that was greatly out of the way for us, and Newgulf by that point was basically dead (a lot of the old company wood-frame houses were being sold and moved all over the area by house-movers and set up as homes for people moving into the surrounding areas) but the hospital, cafes, and movie theater were all LONG gone by that point... most of them had disappeared in the late 60's or very early 70's. Now Newgulf is all but abandoned-- a small enclave of homes built later now line streets adjoining the east side of the old "company town", which now consists of tree-lined abandoned paved streets criss-crossing in what is now largely abandoned lots, the houses having been sold and moved off decades ago. Most of the old factory works are abandoned in place-- whatever could be reasonably scrapped were sold for scrap decades ago. I remember as a teenager we went out there and bought some hay from the farmer who was leasing the old well field to bale hay. The grounds were criss-crossed by the pipelines to and from the main plant where the hot water was created and sent out through pipes to the wells, and hot sulfur returned from the wells. I remember the pipelines all ran on racks above ground, about waist high, and passed through enormous culverts where they crossed under the roads. The pipes were insulated with something (probably asbestos as it was widely used in industrial insulation at the time it was all built) and covered with aluminum sheet wrapped around over it. We were loading hay in the field and I saw a pipe leaking steam from a pinhole, and there was a large pile of blocks of sulfur on the ground around it. The pinhole leak was evidently weeping sulfur-rich hot water, which was flashing off into steam, and leaving a large stalactite of condensed sulfur hanging off the pipes down toward the ground. Periodically they sent someone out with a sledge hammer to break off the concretions of sulfur off the pipe, so it didn't build up to the point it weighed down the pipes so much that it broke the pipe. They just left the broken pieces of sulfur laying around... I picked one up and dropped it in the bed of the pickup-- I still have it all these years later as part of my rock collection. All the piping was removed decades ago as well, along with their insulation.
To be continued... OL J R :)
Now the old sulfur field is dominated by a huge subsidence lake... over the decades, the ground has sunk from the removal of the sulfur deep underground that was supporting the layers of the Earth above, and created a lake on the surface... You can see it here on the maps... www.google.com/maps/@29.2742886,-95.9014912,841m/data=!3m1!1e3 You can clearly see some of the old sulfur well field roads that lead out into the lake where the ground sank from under them... there's even power lines and old oil storage tanks out in the middle of the lake, that were once on dry land until the ground sank from under them and the lake formed up around them. It's rather remarkable to see. There are two subsidence lakes next to each other, separated by a narrow strip of land, and the old main reservoir is the roughly square construction visible to the southwest. A similar subsidence lake formed out on my old bus route when I drove a school bus, near the old Jefferson Lake sulfur plant east of Guy, TX... it's visible here... www.google.com/maps/@29.3841296,-95.7219009,2964m/data=!3m1!1e3 The plant there is completely gone, only the lake remains, though they've opened a landfill just to the east of it, which is visible on the satellite image. Just across from Long Point road running west to Guy, you can see the tree-lined old railroad right of way that used to be used by the trains carrying sulfur out of the plant-- trains were pushed and pulled back west from the Jefferson Lake plant to the turning wye on the other side of the main highway (state highway 36), where the trains turned 90 degrees through the wye and then headed back north through the countryside and eventually through downtown Needville on their way northward to join the main tracks outside Rosenberg-Richmond, where they could travel to Houston to the refineries and the Houston Ship Channel to be loaded onto freighters or south to Galveston to the Port to be loaded onto ships there, like the sulfur from TG. Jefferson Lake was closed down WAY before my time though...
Back in the early 00's (IIRC) a company came and started generating electric power by tapping into the huge reservoir of superheated water that remains down in the sulfur formation deep underground... the Earth itself has insulated the superheated water all these decades and so the water has remained at about almost 300 degrees F, so they can pump that hot water to the surface, and use it to boil steam to spin a turbine, a process known as "co-generation' that makes use of waste heat from industrial plants and such. Doing this recaptures some of the energy burned in fuel to heat the water decades ago when the sulfur was being mined, then the cooler water is pumped back down to the bottom of the formation. It's the only remaining industrial activity at the site.
It's a shame... I'll have to shoot a video down in Newgulf some time... all that remains are a few nicer more modern homes and Newgulf Elementary School, whose students tranfer to Boling ISD to attend high school and junior high.
Later! OL J R :)
I lived there for 25 years and never felt the ground rumble more than twice and once was in the middle 80's when a rig caught fire. That's bs
@@scottsimpson5223 Well dunno where you lived but I PROMISE you our house trembled enough constantly for the chain to wear a slot clean through the door trim beside the door when I was a kid. Maybe you lived in a different area where the ground was more stable, just means you were in a different area than I was not that what I said was BS. Of course being an inconsiderate @ss, I guess maybe you couldn't figure that much out for yourself. Have a good one! OL J R :)
WOW.. it's still creepy beautiful..
Looking beyond the smokestacks, there seems to be a very large body of water. Is that a lake, or an illusion? Thanks
There are two reservoirs adjacent to the town, one is still used by an energy company I believe
On hot summer evenings we used to go out for a sunset drive along the road atop the levee that bounded one of the reservoirs. It was adjacent to a wonderful park with picnic tables, baseball diamond etc. Here we went to Boy Scout camp. And we learned to swim by a pier constructed in the reservoir.
One of those bodies of water is the TGS reservoir. This was used for steam generation to melt the sulphur to make it flow to the surface. The other one is the flooded sulphur field after the levee surrounding the sulphur field broke and let the San Bernard River in.
Subsidence lakes... all the sulfur that was taken out of the ground far below that was holding up the land above it... over the decades the ground settled and filled with water, now it's an enormous lake. You can see it clearly in google Earth or on maps here...
www.google.com/maps/@29.269726,-95.9012974,2967m/data=!3m1!1e3
You can clearly see the two greenish lakes to the top and left of the map, separated by a small tongue of land. The reservoir is the large lighter colored brownish sorta square looking lake to the southwest, which is clearly constructed to hold water for the plant. If you zoom in on the subsidence lake, you can clearly see where the old well field roads that went out to the wells from which the sulfur was pumped have sunk into the lake as the ground sank beneath them. There's even big steel liquid holding tanks out in the middle of the lake, that were once on dry land, where the ground has sunk under them into the lake... there's even a power line crossing the lake where it was built on dry land that has since sunk to become lake bottom. The lake isn't very deep but continues sinking...
Back in the 70's they closed the old north entrance-- there used to be a 2 lane highway that went from the old main plant (smokestacks) and the entrance to Newgulf (town itself) and connected up with FM 442 just a couple miles east of Boling. They closed this road due to subsidence and cracking and sinking of parts of the road and it being "too unsafe for travel". That leaves only the road heading west out of Newgulf a couple miles to FM 1301 to connect what's left of the town with Boling a few miles north or Pledger several miles south.
I grew up on our farm west of Needville just on the other side of the San Bernard river, in Fort Bend county... we went past there A LOT going to and from Boling on our way to our other farm at Shiner 90 miles west in Lavaca county. Dad used to tell stories about going to the movies out at the theater in Newgulf and eating at the cafe on dates and stuff when he was a high schooler in the mid-60's. I vividly remember the sulfur trains with their stubby half-length rail cars hauling liquid sulfur out of the plant in the early-mid 70's... they had abandoned the process shown here of making the enormous block of sulfur and then breaking it up and loading the crushed sulfur solids into railroad gondola cars, in favor of just pumping the liquid sulfur into rail tank cars with heater coils on them... they'd stay hot enough for the trip due to the sheer mass of sulfur I suppose and if any DID solidify inside the car, the cars were equipped with heating coils inside the tanks that they could hook up to superheated steam to melt the sulfur out of the cars anyway. The train cars were VERY short compared to typical railroad tank cars, like those we see today, since sulfur was twice as heavy as water, thus the cars could be much smaller and still have the railroad wheelsets and axles (trucks) loaded to capacity. I remember those short little cars used to wig-wag back and forth something awful, rocking back and forth to and fro as they rolled down the tracks, some so bad they looked like they were about to flip completely off the tracks... some hardly wiggled at all and some make "waves" that rocked in staggered unison, like a rope whipped back and forth... then you'd see a car or few that wouldn't wiggle at all, then usually another car that would rock in time completely opposite of the others... it was weird and mesmerizing... I'd watch the trains go through Boling when we got caught at the crossing or at the angled crossing cutting across 1301 in nearby Iago, and the tracks paralleled 1301 almost all the way into Wharton, so I could watch the train as we passed it most of the way to Wharton... By the late 70's the trainloads of sulfur fell off from daily or nearly so to about once a week, then less and less and finally stopped altogether. They ripped the tracks out in the mid-80's or so when I was in high school IIRC. In the early 80's, they had a huge sinkhole open up in the middle of FM 442 connecting Needville to Boling, so my parents had to go to work and we had to go to Shiner detouring through gravel roads through the surrounding farms for a couple years til they could pump it dry and refill it with dirt and pave a new road over it. That was in early 1982 IIRC and I remember two vehicles ran off into it in the darkness, since it collapsed at night. Luckily for the drivers most pickups back then didn't have air conditioning so they had their windows down, and they managed to swim out of their rapidly sinking vehicles. I remember when it first happened they said they thought the hole could be as deep as 750 feet, but they started pumping it dry and in a month or so they had it pumped out, and it was only about 100 feet deep, the pickups and broken pavement still resting on the bottom. They think that sulfur or other stuff pumped out from down there created a void that slowly collapsed, the roof caving off and settling to the bottom, until over time it rose to the surface like a bubble in a swimming pool... eventually the final layers of earth above the hole collapsed into it and created the sinkhole. Sure was glad when they filled it in and repaved the road over it, and we could again take the main highway, as it cut ten minutes off the trip even going 8 miles from our house to Boling, or anywhere else further west (like Wharton or Shiner).
Later! OL J R :)
There was a reservoir built to service the company, since superheated water and steam were used to melt the sulfur out of the ground (what was known as the Frosch method). I first learned to swim in that reservoir during cub scout camp the the public park nearby.
This is really awesome! My mom grew up in Ganado, and we always stopped near here on our way there.
ETA... I would guess that the growth is a continuation of Houston white flight. Katy, Tomball, Rosenberg, New Caney Mont Belvieu...all no longer that small anymore.
Did you use a planr of steam hot water for taked out.
Bruh its not abandon
they come and go. Depends on what decade it is...bruh.
Were you able to just drive right on through towards the stacks?
Yes, it's open all the way to the generating station
@@ScottDaileyTH-cam fantastic. Great video
Do u now any Samora’s from there
To operate a company town and only a company town is an incredibly shitty thing to do.
Used to be a VERY common procedure in mining... and other remote resource extraction worksites. The "coal towns" of West Virginia come to mind, or the "lumber camps" of the Piney Woods of East Texas or the upper northwest. Lot of old "oil towns" and stuff too over the years. People didn't have much choice-- you went where the work was, and the "company housing" was usually much better than you could have afforded to build on your own, and when the resources dried up and the town died, you weren't left with a house in the middle of nowhere and no work nearby to make a living... so it wasn't ALL bad...
I remember as a kid on my old school bus route in the mid-late 70's, there used to be a large natural gas pipeline compressor plant about five miles from our farm... The bus drove down there and dropped off and picked up about probably 8-12 kids back then... The compressor station serviced three 36 inch gas pipelines and had four HUGE compressors running 24 hours a day... they sucked the gas out of the pipeline and raised the pressure to about 540 PSI to "boost" the pressure and thus the amount of gas the pipelines could carry, from the gas well fields west of El Campo, TX that carried the gas to the refineries and ship channel in Houston. They had a single almost half-mile long street entering the plant grounds, lined with "company housing" rented to the workers, and then an office and warehouse and the compressor buildings themselves, a shop for mechanic work that went on there, etc. The laws changed in the late 70's and they could no longer run as high a pressure in the pipelines, so they didn't need the compressor station any longer, and almost everyone lost their jobs. All the families moved away and the houses were almost all sold, except for a couple houses down closest to the plant itself, which remained as the office and the other as the worker's "break room" and bathrooms. I worked down there one year right after high school, doing right of way mowing, since I was a farm kid and knew how to run tractors and equipment. That was our main job, we had an on-site ROW maintenance boss and his secretary in the "main office" and a pipeline locating guy who would go mark and monitor the pipeline whenever any other businesses or municipalities were digging across or under or over the pipeline, to make sure they did it correctly and didn't hit or rupture the pipelines. The rest of us were in maintenance and ROW mowing. One time I DID get to go into the old compressor house-- the compressor engines themselves were impressive-- like giant ship engines, the crankcases were bolted to the floor and had huge rectangular manhole plates along their length to allow guys to crawl inside to do repairs like install new bearings in the engines. The cast iron cylinders were bolted on top, 24 of them IIRC, and they housed pistons about the size of five gallon buckets. The cylinder heads were about 3 feet in diameter and about a foot and a half thick, cast iron, lifted in place by an overhead crane, and bolted down. I still have an old valve from the engine that I was given when we were cleaning junk out of the warehouse-- it's about a foot long or so and about 4 inches in diameter, like a gigantic version of the valves you'd have in a lawnmower engine or your car engine. On the RH side of the compressor engines in the middle were the gas compressors-- huge 4 foot diameter rounded housings for a giant piston, capped with a valve plate and cylinder head. The valve plate was a circle divided in two, with hundreds of about 1 inch diameter tapered holes drilled in them, half from one side, and half from the other. Into these holes were inserted conical plastic poppet valves with coil springs behind them, the top half facing toward the piston, the bottom half away. The cylinder head was also divided in half, with the top half being the gas inlet into the compressor from the pipeline coming from El Campo, and the bottom half going back to the pipeline going to Houston. Gas went through the poppets from the pipeline into the piston cylinder, then was compressed and forced out the other poppet valves into the pipeline at higher pressure. We did maintenance and cut rights-of-way, but a couple of years later they closed the site completely and then tore down the compressor station. It's just an empty field now, rented for growing hay, and of course the pipeline pig traps and other pipeline crossovers and stuff in the old basement of the compressor station.
Later! OL J R :)
No. It was a wonderful place to live, with well cared-for houses, good schools and a lively downtown. The company leased us our 2 bedroom house for $14 a month (back in the 1940's), and painted it outside and inside every 3 or 4 years, furnishing summer employment to high-school boys. It was a great place to grow up and gave me a foundation that eventually led me to an Ivy League education and a successful career as a teacher and composer in Philadelphia and New York City.
yeah? tell Pittsburg that. And Flint Michigan. How about little towns with coal mines. How about Baytown, Texas? It was a company oil. town. How about Silver mining company towns? You didn't major in business history, did ya "Maunster"?
@@KB-ke3fi Bruh, you be laying it down. Preach!
Brings back a lot of memories.
Jimmie Barnhill my dad was born there he is a Edmund Samora
I really like your channel man. Keep it up!
My last name is Dailey as well. I am wondering where your family is from? I live in Tyler Texas.
That side of the family is from the Austin area and the Hill Country
Fantastic work!
Awesome video!
Thw town is not abandoned at all went last week cant sneek into any buildings when u got 300 houses full with ppl.
Gavin Hall yo
I know samoras
My grand mas nows
Gavin Hall u sneeked in the club house
Nice video! Just a minor critique that sometimes (not always), your voice tends to taper out towards the end of your sentences, making the last few words harder to understand.
Thank you Akitomo, I will try and improve on this.
C'mon man.
Pasadena historic downtown is abandoned as well