The Island That Helped Win Every War

The island's industrial life began in 1917, right after the United States entered World War I.

The country needed ships faster than the coasts could build them, and Beaumont qualified. It sat on the Neches with a recently deepened channel to the Gulf, it had East Texas pine close at hand, and it had a working port. So a shipyard opened on the island, and it built wooden cargo ships from local timber, meant to carry supplies to Allied forces in Europe.

The war ended in November 1918 before many of the hulls were finished. Some were converted to barges. Others were abandoned upstream in the river, where their wooden frames still surface during dry spells when the water runs low.

The yard itself kept going. In 1922 it was bought and renamed Pennsylvania Shipyards. Through the 1920s and the Depression, it built oil tankers and industrial vessels, and Texaco, founded at Spindletop a few miles away, became one of its biggest customers. In 1937 the yard became one of the first in the country to build tankers with complete arc welding instead of rivets. It was a technical jump that would matter enormously when the next war came.

On December 8, 1941, the United States entered the Second World War, and the island went from a shipyard to something closer to the center of the whole city's life.

Workers came from all over the South, drawn by wages the region had never seen. Beaumont's population grew from roughly 59,000 in 1940 to an estimated 80,000 by 1943. Housing could not keep up. The city threw together a 600-unit emergency complex, and it still was ’t enough, so many workers commuted in from surrounding towns every day. Meat, sugar, leather, rubber, and gasoline were all rationed.

The yard expanded from two launch slipways to four. Employment rose from a few hundred workers to 9,100 by 1945. As men shipped out, women moved into jobs long held by men, working as welders, machinists, and pipefitters. The same shift was happening all over town. Women drove buses, ran shops, and kept things going.

In May 1943, the government sent photographer John Vachon to document Beaumont for the Office of War Information. His photographs of the shipyard and its workers are in the Library of Congress today.

One hundred nine vessels launched from that island during the war. Cargo freighters, tugboats, refrigerated ships, and Navy minesweepers, many sent straight to active theaters.

One of them was the USS Portent, a minesweeper laid down on the island in November 1941 and commissioned in the spring of 1943. She was sent to the Mediterranean to clear mines ahead of the Allied push into Southern Europe, and she earned her first battle star at Salerno that September.

Four months later, off the Italian coast, supporting the landings at Anzio, she struck a mine at ten in the morning on January 22, 1944. She was the first ship lost in that operation. Eighteen men died when she went down in ninety feet of water. Her commanding officer wrote afterward that every man aboard had behaved courageously.

She was built here, a few blocks from downtown, by people whose names are not on any plaque.

When the fighting ended, the demand for warships fell off fast, but the island did not go quiet.

In 1947 it built the first large liquefied petroleum gas tanker ever made, exactly the kind of vessel the postwar energy economy would run on. The next year Bethlehem Steel bought the yard, and as offshore oil exploration pushed into the Gulf, the island became a major fabrication site for drilling equipment. It built seventy-two offshore rigs, including some of the largest of their kind.

The offshore market collapsed in the 1980s. The site changed hands and purposes several times over the following decades. Then in September 2017, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Southeast Texas for days, and the island, surrounded by the Neches on every side, went underwater. The operator there closed that fall.

Here is the part that ties it together. What started on that island never actually ended; it just moved downstream.

The Department of Defense now ranks the Port of Beaumont as the busiest military port in the nation. The U.S. Army's 842nd Transportation Battalion is permanently headquartered there, and it has moved more military cargo in support of active operations than any other port on the American mainland.

So the next time you cross the I-10 bridge, look for the island. Now you know what you are looking at, which is more than the gate will ever tell you.

Reporting for this piece drew on KFDM's account of the Pennsylvania Shipyards and the historical record of the USS Portent. The Library of Congress holds photographs by John Vachon.