The Galveston Seawall

The famous Galveston seawall can be seen in this undivided back postcard from around 1903.

In an earlier version of this page, I reported that this card may be an artist's conception of the Seawall since I was not familiar with the curve shown in this picture. Other postcard collectors have told me that they think they've seen the same image used for postcards of other places. More recently, however, I have been told that indeed an early version of the Seawall featured this curve. The Seawall curved off the beach down Sixth Street, and left to Eighth Street. Although later this portion was filled in by the Army Corps of Engineers, you can reportedly still see the remains of this structure on Sixth Street.

The other card pictured here is a "real photo" card from the 1940s. Notice how the sandy beach is missing in the photo. Although the photograph of this scene might have been taken during a storm with an extremely high tide, beach erosion has long been a problem on the Texas gulf coast.

This HTML page is copyright ©1998-2000 Leslie Carl Seiler. All rights reserved.

Updated 30 November 2000. HTML errors corrected 14 September 2003.