Ep. 23: The Great Storm of 1900, Part 1: A Storm Brewing
Wise About Texas
Ken Wise
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2016
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The worst natural disaster in American history occurred on September 8, 1900 when a massive hurricane hit Galveston, Texas. At the time, Galveston was the largest city in Texas and one of the most prosperous in the country. Weather forecasting was not keeping pace with prosperity, however, and the folks in Galveston had no way to know what was about to hit the island. In part 1, you’ll learn about victorian-era Galveston and the weathermen who thought they understood hurricanes. This episode will take you through the morning of September 8, a day that changed Galveston, and Texas, forever.
Galveston about 1881
The track of the Great Storm
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | How do you? Howdy and welcome to Wise About Texas, the Texas History Podcast. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm your host Ken Wise and I appreciate you tuning in today. We hit over 30,000 downloads since the last |
| 0:25.7 | episode so lots of folks are getting wise about Texas. I hope you'll share this show |
| 0:30.7 | with your friends. We need to protect and preserve the great |
| 0:34.4 | history of this state. Well it's August 29th 2016 and we are in the heart of the |
| 0:41.5 | hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. |
| 0:44.0 | As regular listeners know, I'm a native Houstonian and part-time Galvestonian. |
| 0:48.0 | But what you may not know is that one of my grandfathers was BOI, which in Texas means born on the island, that's Galveston Island. |
| 0:56.0 | He was born on December 28, 1900. |
| 0:59.2 | So his mother was very pregnant when she survived the great storm of 1900, a hurricane that ended up |
| 1:05.3 | being the worst natural disaster in United States history and it remains so today. |
| 1:11.6 | One of my great-great-grandfathers, |
| 1:14.0 | Arnold Wolfram, survived the storm as well. |
| 1:17.5 | And we'll talk about him later. |
| 1:19.7 | That storm changed the city |
| 1:21.9 | and the state of Texas forever. |
| 1:24.3 | This is part one of the great storm, |
| 1:26.4 | and we're gonna go back to Victorian-era Galveston |
| 1:29.7 | and get wise about Texas. |
| 1:32.4 | Well, we've talked about Galveston several times on this podcast. |
| 1:35.4 | It was mostly deserted when the refugees from the runaway scrape arrived on the east end of |
| 1:40.3 | the island ahead of the Mexican Army in 1836. The Provisional Government of Texas made |
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