ABSTRACT
The Houston Ship Channel is a vast waterway—a combination of numerous natural features and extensive human construction and dredging. It overwhelms the landscape as a major transportation route, a massive industrial corridor dominated by petroleum refining and petrochemical production, and a central component of the Houston metropolitan region. The Houston Ship Channel in southeast Texas is one of the busiest water courses in the United States. The idea for a ship channel can be traced to Houston merchants in the 1850s who were dissatisfied with those who ran the Port of Galveston which controlled access to the Gulf of Mexico and to the shipping lanes beyond it. The rise of shipping and commercial development along Buffalo Bayou in the nineteenth century was an essential precedent to the construction of a ship channel.
