Galveston County Texas map
29.23° N · 94.89° W · County seat: Galveston · 874 sq mi · Central Time
More than half of Galveston County is water — 495 of its 874 square miles — because the county boundary runs out across Galveston Bay and the county's land is mostly a barrier island, a peninsula and a strip of mainland behind them. The seawall along the island's Gulf side, raised after the hurricane of 1900, is the single most consequential piece of engineering on the Texas coast.
Centered on Galveston Bay. The island runs southwest to northeast along the bottom; Bolivar Peninsula continues northeast past the ferry landing; I-45 comes down the mainland through League City, Texas City and La Marque.
Where Galveston County is
The county was created in 1838 out of Brazoria, Harris and Liberty counties, taking its name from its seat, which in turn honours Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana who ordered the bay surveyed in the 1780s. Only three counties border it: Harris to the north, Chambers to the northeast across East Bay, and Brazoria to the west. Everything else is water or open Gulf.
The northwestern boundary is Clear Creek and Clear Lake, which is why NASA's Johnson Space Center and Space Center Houston sit just outside the county in Harris County while the suburbs that house their workforce — League City, Webster's south side, Kemah, Clear Lake Shores — are inside it. Downtown Houston is 47 miles northwest, Pasadena 37 miles northwest and Port Arthur 73 miles northeast around the bay.
League City, not Galveston, has been the county's largest city since the early 2000s. The population centre has moved steadily north up I-45 away from the island for a century.
Cities and towns
Populations are the 2020 census count for the part of each place inside the county.
| Place | Type | 2020 population |
|---|---|---|
| League City (part) | City | 111,819 |
| Galveston | City · county seat | 53,695 |
| Texas City (part) | City | 51,905 |
| Friendswood (part) | City | 30,499 |
| Dickinson | City | 21,433 |
| La Marque | City | 18,377 |
| Santa Fe | City | 12,736 |
| Hitchcock | City | 7,302 |
| Kemah | City | 1,805 |
| Bayou Vista | City | 1,762 |
| Clear Lake Shores | City | 1,277 |
| Tiki Island | Village | 1,110 |
| Jamaica Beach | City | 1,079 |
Bolivar Peninsula, Crystal Beach, Port Bolivar and Gilchrist are unincorporated and are reached only by ferry or by SH-87 from Chambers County.
Roads, the causeway and the ferry
- I-45 (Gulf Freeway) – the only interstate, running from Houston down through League City, Dickinson, La Marque and Texas City, over the Galveston Causeway and onto the island as Broadway.
- SH-146 – the bay-side route from Kemah and Seabrook north to Baytown, and south into Texas City.
- SH-3 – the old Houston–Galveston highway beside the rail line, threading La Marque, Dickinson and League City parallel to I-45.
- SH-6 and FM-3005 – west along Galveston Island past the state park to San Luis Pass, and inland toward Santa Fe, Hitchcock and Alvin.
- SH-87 – the peninsula road from Port Bolivar northeast through Crystal Beach and High Island into Chambers County.
- The Bolivar ferry – a free TxDOT service carrying SH-87 traffic across Bolivar Roads between the east end of Galveston Island and Port Bolivar, a crossing of roughly two and a half miles. It is the only link between the island and the peninsula; the alternative by road is well over 60 miles around the top of the bay.
- SH-99, the Grand Parkway – planned to reach the county's northern edge as the outer Houston ring is extended.
The 1900 storm and the seawall
On 8 September 1900 a hurricane came ashore on a city that was then the richest in Texas and one of the busiest ports in the country. The island's highest natural ground was under nine feet, the storm surge went over all of it, and at least 6,000 people died — still the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. Galveston never regained its commercial lead; Houston, 50 miles inland up a dredged bayou, took it.
What the city did instead was rebuild the ground. A concrete seawall was begun in 1902 along the Gulf front and extended in stages until it ran about ten miles; behind it, the whole developed part of the island was jacked up and filled with sand dredged from the bay, raising some blocks by more than a dozen feet. Buildings were lifted on screw jacks while people lived in them. The seawall's top now carries a sidewalk and a wide beach nourishment programme at its foot, and it held through Hurricane Ike in 2008, when the unprotected west end and Bolivar Peninsula did not.
Ports, refineries and the waterfront
The Port of Galveston works the north side of the island, with cruise terminals that make it one of the busiest cruise homeports in the country alongside cargo docks and an offshore-rig repair trade. Ten miles up the bay, the Port of Texas City and its refineries and chemical plants handle the heavy industry; on 16 April 1947 the ammonium nitrate cargo of the French freighter Grandcamp exploded there, killing several hundred people in what remains the worst industrial accident in American history.
On the island itself, the Strand district preserves the iron-front commercial buildings that survived 1900, the University of Texas Medical Branch has occupied the east end since 1891 as the oldest medical school in Texas, and Texas A&M University at Galveston trains merchant marine officers at Pelican Island. Galveston Island State Park spans the island from bay to Gulf on the west end, and Kemah's boardwalk and Seabrook's marinas draw the Clear Lake boating traffic at the county's northern tip.