Point Bolivar

Bolivar Point In 1815, Colonel Henry Perry established a military camp here as part of a plan to invade Spanish Texas. In 1816, Galveston-based privateer Lewis-Michelle de Aury forced shiploads of captured African slaves to walk from this point to New Orleans along old American Indian trails. Aury is credited with naming the point after South American liberator Simóne Bolívar. While commanding a filibuster to win Texas independence, James Long established for Las Casas on Bolivar Point in 1820–1821. His wife, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, lived alone at the primitive fort through the harsh winter of 1821. During that time she gave birth to Mary James Long, one of the first angle children born in Texas. A lighthouse, erected here by the federal government in 1852 and later dismantled by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was rebuilt after the war. Many area residents sought shelter within the lighthouse during the damaging storms of 1900 and 1915. The Gulf and Interstate Railroad was completed from Beaumont to Bolivar Point in 1896. A boon to peninsula farmers, the railroad was destroyed in the 1900 storm, then we built in 1903. Ferry service, purchased by the Texas Highway Department in 1933, continues to provide free public access to Galveston Island. (1995) Marker is property of the State of Texas Submitted by: Eric Goodill