Mrs. Fillmore Stayed While Galveston Rose Beneath Her. We Asked What It Cost.

In the photographs, Galveston looks like a city that has misplaced its ground. Two-story frame houses perch on timber cribbing, bracing nailed against their walls like splints. A woman climbs a staircase to the West End Grocery, whose front door now sits about where a hayloft would. A pontoon bridge crosses a canal at Tremont Street. A row of children sits on a pipeline, watching it spit wet sand into what used to be a street.¹

After the hurricane of 1900 killed thousands of its residents, Galveston built a seawall. The first 3.3 miles were done by July 1904, for a little under $1.6 million.² Then the city tried something stranger. It raised itself.

Dredges loaded sand between the jetties, steamed up a canal cut through the middle of town, and pumped the fill through pipelines beneath houses that had been jacked into the air. Ground that had averaged five or six feet above mean low tide ended up at eight feet on the bay side and about twenty-two at the seawall.³ Some 2,156 houses went up.¹ People went on living in them. In the Rosenberg Library's wonderfully deadpan phrasing, they got home "on boardwalks fastened to the top of fences."³

Bonds paid for the seawall. The grade raising, the Library notes, was paid for by "taxpayers and the individual property owners."³ Its paperwork survives in good order. Edmund R. Cheesborough, secretary of the Grade Raising Board, left minutes, logbooks, and six volumes of newspaper scrapbooks, most of them devoted to the raising.⁴ What we could not find, in any of the material available to us, was a single word from anyone who rented a room south of Broadway (the island's main avenue, with the Gulf and the seawall on its far side) while the ground rose beneath them.

So we went looking for a boardinghouse keeper. When the archive came up empty, we built one.

Mrs. Temperance Fillmore is invented. She keeps eleven lodgers, selling each of them a bed and meals by the week, in a braced two-story frame house. The house stands inside one of the dike-enclosed sections, each roughly a quarter-mile square, that were walled off before the sand came in.⁵ She appears in no census, directory, or photograph of the period, which she regards as the only privacy the Grade Raising Board ever left her. (No relation to the president. She has heard the joke about the fill. She has heard all of them.)

We found her in late summer 1911. Depending on which source you trust, the citywide raising was by then finished,⁶ nearly finished,⁵ or seventeen years from done.³ Her block, at any rate, is getting its sand now. Her porch hangs some eight feet above a gray slurry that has not yet made up its mind to be land. A discharge pipe runs past the side yard and gurgles at intervals, like a man trying not to interrupt.

Your lodgers walk the fence tops to reach your front door. What does that do to a boardinghouse?

Temperance: It sorts them. (She sets down the pitcher.) You find out who you've got.

When the dike went in around our section, they nailed planks along the fence tops. So now a grown man comes home on a board about as wide as a Bible is tall, with the slurry sucking at the posts underneath him. Mr. Albers, second floor front, sells cotton bagging on the Strand. He comes home with his hat in one hand, his supper in the other, and his balance in neither. Two hats have gone into the fill since June. Neither was mine. I keep count anyway. Somebody in this city ought to be counting something besides cubic yards.

Miss Ruhl takes her shoes off and goes across like a cat. The Methodist minister came to call one Sunday and turned back halfway. I've decided not to read anything into that.

How did you learn how high your house had to go?

Temperance: A man with a pole. Well. The notices came first, papers from the Board with Mr. Cheesborough's name at the bottom, everything very correct. I read them twice. What they came to was this: lift your house, and the city will bring the ground up to meet it.

Then the engineer's man walked down the street and marked a pole where the ground would end up.¹ (She raises a flat hand above her head and squints at it, as though it might be lying.) Higher than me. I stood next to that pole a good while.

The house is on jacks now. Who paid to put it there?

Temperance: I did. Well, the bank did, and I'll be paying the bank until I'm a good deal older than I'd like. The sand belongs to the city, meaning the taxpayers, and I'm a taxpayer, so I suppose I bought a share of that too. Lifting is the owner's job.³ That's the rule, and I don't quarrel with it. I was here in 1900. I know what the water does.

But here's the thing I keep turning over. (A long pause. The pipe fills it.)

On paper, my lodgers pay nothing for any of this. They don't own a board of it. When the Board works out who bore the cost, they'll find me and the city and nobody else. And yet Mr. Albers walks a fence to his bed every night. Miss Ruhl, who does piecework, carries her sewing along that same plank. The mosquitoes off the standing water eat all of us at the same rate. They're the only thing in this town that doesn't check the deed.

So I took a dollar a week off everybody's board for the summer. Nobody asked me to. I could see Mr. Albers doing the arithmetic at supper, and I'd rather lose a dollar than a lodger. Two left anyway, for a block that's already been filled, where there's a sidewalk again. I don't blame them.

(She stops.) I suppose that's the thing I sold, too. I can't leave. The house is the business. It's sitting on jackscrews with a note against it, and when the sand is in, it'll be worth more than it's ever been. By then Mr. Albers will be in Houston selling bagging, and he'll never know he helped pay for my high ground.

Why not close up for the season and wait it out somewhere dry?

Temperance: Because a boardinghouse that closes for a season doesn't reopen as a boardinghouse. It reopens as an empty house with a story about it. My lodgers would find other tables, and tables are habits. Staying is how I keep the thing that makes the house worth lifting at all.

(She laughs.) Listen to me. I sound like Mr. Albers explaining bagging.

Not every house went up. Ashton Villa, the Brown place on Broadway, stayed where it was while the fill rose around it.¹ Did that ever tempt you?

Temperance: Oh, I heard about that. They let the sand come up around it like a bath. Nobody told me why, and I won't pretend to know. Maybe brick doesn't care to be jacked.

I can tell you why it wouldn't do for me, though. Bury my ground floor and I lose the dining room and three bedrooms. For me that floor is the margin. A family can give up a floor and still be a family. If I give up a floor, I'm a widow with a tall house.

What has the fill taken that you didn't expect?

Temperance: The yard. The sand comes in with salt water still in it and kills whatever it touches.¹ My husband planted a fig by the back steps the year we married. It's standing out there dead, with sand up to its knees.

(She glances toward the side yard.) The children don't mind a bit. They sit on the pipe in a row like birds and watch it spit.¹ To them this is the best summer Galveston ever had. I can't decide whether that's wisdom or just being nine.

Is it worth it?

Temperance: Ask the next storm.

(She does not elaborate. The pipe does.)

A hundred years from now, what will someone find in the records of this summer?

Temperance: Numbers. (She thinks.) How many houses, how many yards of sand, where the line was on the pole. I'm sure Mr. Cheesborough's books will be very complete.⁴ There'll be photographs of the big houses and the grocery steps. They'll know exactly how the ground was made.

Whether anyone minded, though. Plenty of people minded. But the ones who minded most were renting, and you don't write to the Board about a house that isn't yours. You just go somewhere else.

(She frowns, as if she has surprised herself.) I'll be in the record because I own the dirt. Mr. Albers won't be in it at all. And he walked that fence more nights than I did.

Mrs. Fillmore's block, wherever it was, would have been finished eventually. The last section of the grade raising wasn't completed until 1928.³ The salt-killed yards were replanted, and Galveston would come to call itself the Oleander City.⁶

The raising never covered the whole island. The Washington Post reported in 2024 that most of Galveston's area remains unaltered and low-lying, and that parts of the area along 59th Street see some of the worst high-tide flooding.⁷ The high ground went where the plan put it. The bill for it is partly on file. The deeds are in the archive, itemized and correct. The people who walked the fences home left no forwarding address.

What's documented, and what we made up

Documented

• Fence-top boardwalks, and people living in their raised houses during filling.³
• Salt-water fill that killed vegetation.¹
• Engineers' grade marks on poles, and children watching from the pipelines.¹
• Ashton Villa left unraised while fill came up around it. The Rosenberg Library gives no reason.¹
• The cost falling on taxpayers and property owners.³
• Cheesborough's role, and the contents of his collection by title.⁴

Invented

• Mrs. Fillmore, her lodgers, the minister, her bank note, the rent reduction, the two departures, and the fig tree.
• Her notices and their signature. We have not read the item-level contents of the Board's records.
• Her exact location. We found no block-by-block fill dates.

Not found anywhere

• Any record of what boarders or tenants paid, lost, or said while the city rose beneath them.

Footnotes

1. Rosenberg Library, "Residential Views": https://www.galvestonhistorycenter.org/research/residential-views ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Rosenberg Library, "Seawall": https://www.galvestonhistorycenter.org/research/seawall ↩

3. Rosenberg Library, "Grade Raising": https://www.galvestonhistorycenter.org/research/grade-raising ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. Rosenberg Library, Edmund R. Cheesborough Papers, MSS #22-0024 (partial inventory): https://www.galvestonhistorycenter.org/archive/exhibits/graderaising/Manuscripts/Cheesborough/index.html ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. ASCE, "Galveston Seawall and Grade Raising": https://www.asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/historic-landmarks/galveston-seawall-and-grade-raising ↩ ↩²

6. ASCE Civil Engineering, "Weathering the Storm" (excerpt): https://ascelibrary.org/doi/pdf/10.1061/ciegag.0000797 ↩ ↩²

7. Washington Post, 2024, Galveston sea-level-rise feature: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/galveston-sea-level-rise-condo-development/ ↩