The PORG&N Railway which was controlled by the SLBM, reached Seadrift in December 1909 and POC by February 1, 1910. The line between Bloomington, Seadrift, Lela-Pens and Port O’Connor measured a total of thirty-eight miles and was deemed the POC Branch which opened for business on March 1, 1910. This photos shows the stop at Lela-Pens just over 100 years later.

One thing I know for certain after two years of interviewing and learning about the people that make up Seadrift, Texas: the older generations were absolutely fascinated by the train! I wrote an article about the railroad in January of this year and since the recent move of the original train depot, my mind has been pondering… about all the unanswered questions I had.

First off, here’s a bit of history from the January 14, 2011 article:

On June 6, 1903, the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway (SLBM), also known as The Frisco; was chartered to run from Sinton to the Rio Grande at Brownsville with a branch extending westerly to the southeast corner of Starr County. The Port O’Connor (POC) Branch was one of the branches created which ran from Bloomington, Lela Pens and Seadrift to POC. March 1, 1910, the train depot was opened for business and used to freight large shipments of oysters and fish daily from Seadrift. By 1912, thousands of acres of cotton were grown and hauled to Seadrift to be ginned by the city’s new gin. The railway, over time merged with multiple lines and has numerous aliases, from the International – Great Northern Railroad (I&GN) to the SLBM to the Port O’Connor, Rio Grande and Northern Railway (PORG&N)—in the end it concluded as the Missouri Pacific Railroad (MoPac). The MoPac was one of the first railroads in the United States west of the Mississippi River which grew from a combination of a dozen mergers classifying it as a “Class I Railroad.” A Class I railroad is a large freight railroad company classified based on operating revenue. At the end of 1955, MoPac owned or leased 98 diesel units and 4,377 cars, with revenue of $461,554 and $15,759,273 of freight earnings.

So I set out to find out more. Several phone calls later, more pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. The last time I researched the railroad, it did not dawn on me where Lela-Pens, the stop between Seadrift and POC, was. As you are driving south, leaving Seadrift, about a mile outside of the city limits on the left-hand side looms a red building which looks like a barn; it’s appropriately marked “LELA-PENS” on the front. Joe Beaver Sr. told me they would bring cattle there and ship them North. They would also ship in gravel and stock pile it on the roads. Can you believe all of the times we drive by there (that I drove by there) and had no clue it was once a stop on the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway?!?

Joe said, “We would always play on the tracks; we’d collect rocks for our sling shots – they were just about marble size – and terrorize the birds.” As children they would play across the street from the depot in Seadrift on large cement pillars which were in the shape of pyramids. The pillars were located where the car wash is now. Joe also remembers placing pennies on the tracks, even though they were few and far between.

Dorothy Wilson also remembers playing on the tracks. The train was an old steam locomotive. She said, “We’d walk down the railroad tracks, and as the train neared, the conductor would see us and let out steam! We were afraid that steam would burn us so we’d run off the track !” She and her two younger brothers got to ride the train once; she even got to pull the whistle and see where they placed the coal which powered the train.

Much like Joe, Dorothy and her siblings would also place things on the tracks, only they put oyster shells on the track! “We laid them out on the track, hid, waited to see what happened. The train smashed those shells, but then it stopped, maybe looking for us. We were scared! We could have derailed it! Other kids put pennies, but we didn’t ever have pennies. I was born in 1928, the depression started a year afterward,” she said to me, “We weren’t used to anything better.”

Dorothy also remembers by the depot along the tracks the hobos would be sleep everywhere. “Men outta work, lookin’ for work and they were always hungry,” she said. “They would stop at people’s homes and ask for something to eat.” She even heard they would sleep in the boxcars or even underneath them!

Both Joe and Dorothy recall Oscar Rassmusen, lifelong resident of Seadift was the Railroad Depot agent. Oscar Alvin was born February 9, 1895 on Matagorda Island to Andrew Teresa Smith Rasmussen. Dorothy thinks she agitated him, “He had a telegraph machine and I’d love to watch and listen, I’m sure that irritated him. People didn’t have radios back then to get storm reports, so they’d go up to the depot and listen to the storm reports coming in via telegram – it was a busy place.”

History is all around us and we need to realize the value and importance of documenting it will be in our future, our children’s future and those generations we will never have the opportunity to meet. It was not easy for me to find information about the depot, train or railway; much less find residents that were around in those times. Head out to the county museum and learn more about our coastal community! Till next time…

Show below, clippings from Seadrift Success, Seadrift’s first newspaper, May 1915.

The depot at its new home, very close to its original position.