More from my birthday roadtrip…
This photo was taken at about the location of the cross hair on the map below, facing west across the Brazos River. The white smudge on the horizon is smoke from one of the many grass fires that were burning that day along the coast. In my drive around I actually drove through one located inland a bit and my car still has that burned grass smell every morning when I start out.
This was the first time I have ever run this far down the beach here. My family usually tends to go to the Beach at Quintana back up the beach towards the old Brazos River mouth. So I guess I can now say I’ve seen both mouths of the Brazos River.
Quintana is changing though from a sleepy little beachside village to a industrial park surrounding a few homes and a county park. They are building a LPG plant right off the beach on the Intercoastal Channel Side of the “island”. Of course, this is a manmade island. Until man started cutting channels Quintana was a port at the mouth of the Brazos on the mainland. Swampy mainland but mainland non the less.
Handbook of Texas Online – QUINTANA, TX
QUINTANA, TEXAS. Quintana is on the west side of the mouth of the Brazos River and on Farm roads 1495 and 723, directly across the Brazos River Harbor channel from Surfside, two miles southeast of Freeport in Brazoria County. It is believed to have been named for Mexican general Andrés Quintana. A Mexican fort was built there soon after Mexican independence, and Quintana was a major seaport for Austin’s colony. The firm of McKinney, Williams, and Companyqv was established there in the early days of Austin’s colony. Quintana was described variously in the latter half of the 1830s as one of the most delightful places in the country and as a place of “shanties and a mixed population of Yankees, Mexicans, and Indians.” Other accounts mention a hotel, a pavilion, pool halls, and dance halls. A post office was established in 1853 but closed in 1857. It reopened in 1891 and closed in 1915.In 1990 Quintana had a population of fifty-three. The population was thirty-eight in 2000.
Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Quintana, Texas” (accessed February 9, 2008).
BRYAN BEACH, TEXAS. Bryan Beach is a coastal village located on Farm Road 1495 about four miles south of Freeport on the Gulf in southern Brazoria County. Probably named during the second half of the twentieth century for James Perry Bryan, a landowner there in the 1880s, the area served beachgoers and fishermen. Bryan Beach State Recreation Area,qv an 878-acre park located a couple of miles down the beach, opened in 1973. No businesses operated in Bryan Beach, and the settlement had a population of fourteen in 2000.
Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Bryan Beach, Texas” (accessed February 9, 2008).
