June 1973
The Unholy Trinity Incident
An unlikely combination of Wallaceites, Republicans and environmentalists deals a death blow to Dallas' seaport dreams. Breathe easy, Houston.
WHAT DALLAS NEEDS—IN A BIG WAY—is to be a seaport. If it could ship goods, by cheap water transportation, on the Trinity River, from here to the sea—just walk right out there and widen and deepen that river, build a few locks, bridges and reservoirs, get the old Gulf of Mexico right up here—Boy, wouldn't Houston with that dinky little scooped-out bayou be eating its liver then! Big D!
Dallas prides itself on unified leadership. All shoulders to the wheel. And when Dallas wants, Dallas works. It was no accident that the railroads altered their course in 1873 and went through Dallas instead of farther east as planned. There were hints that money changed hands in the Texas Legislature back in those rough-and-tumble frontier days to assure Dallas of the train route.
Let's hear it for your chambers of commerce. Give me your banks, your insurance companies, your buildings yearning to be tall. And give me that barge canal.
The year for these bright-eyed visions is...1972? 1965? 1958?
Nope. 1910.
And even before. Dallas has been thinking about being a seaport for a long time, which is some sort of testimony to the determination of the residents of an improbable city 300 miles inland, with no real reason to be where it is, or to be at all, for that matter.
The first boat up the Trinity that anyone can remember was the Scioto Bell in 1836, five years before John Neely Bryan, the legendary father of Dallas, laid out his cabin on the banks of the Trinity in 1841. Between 1852 and 1874, nearly 50 boats continuously navigated the river as far north as Trinidad in Kaufman County and Porter's Bluff in Ellis County, about 50 miles downriver from Dallas. In 1868, a stern-wheeled steamboat made it all the way to Dallas—but it took a year and four days, approximately the same amount of time as a leisurely trip around the world.
In 1873, the Texas and Pacific Railroad laid its ties through Dallas and the city began to grow. But the dream of river transportation to the sea lingered, kept alive by railroad rates the agricultural Dallasites felt were exorbitant.
After the flood of 1908 which devastated much of Dallas, one George Kessler suggested a levee system to corral future floods. And while we're at it, Kessler said, let's get those boats up the Trinity. The combination of flood control and sea access had strong appeal, particularly when the threat of the river's floods were far more potent than today. People in Dallas don't notice the river much these days, with all the bridges and concrete over it. Before, however, it was often angry and very, very noticeable.
Levees to save Dallas from the river's floods, a canal to make the river navigable. A powerful argument.
Businessmen put strong pressure on Congress to provide help for making the city a seaport, and Congress eventually came through with $20 million for Trinity navigation projects. Then World War I intervened. After the war, Congress had second thoughts and quit funding the project.
Some of the locks built during that period—including some in Dallas County—still stand as mute relics, covered with 50 years of debris, to those early efforts.
Despite the setback for navigation, a levee system for flood control was complete by 1930. In 1931, John W. Carpenter, a strong man in Dallas' political affairs, and Amon C. Carter, who enjoyed a similar position in Fort Worth, got their respective chambers of commerce behind something called the Trinity River Canal Association. A few years and name changes later, but with essentially the same leadership, that group became the Trinity Improvement Association, which it still is. Among its executive committee members are Ben H. Carpenter, John's son, and Amon G. Carter Jr.
Dallas was growing so much that construction went on in the floodplain where it was not protected by levees. Since Mother Nature wasn't on the chamber of commerce, floods kept coming. Pressure built up for more levees and more protection for riverbottom development, such as valuable industrial property close to downtown. Always lingering in the background of the flood control issue in the minds of commerce-conscious Dallas and Fort Worth business leaders was ... The Canal.
By 1958, the area had congressional authority to carry out a serious survey on the canalization idea. The study, completed in 1962, showed the canal itself would only yield 75 cents of benefit for each dollar invested. But if the canal was considered a multi-purpose channel, and if flood control and recreation benefits were included, the yield would be $1.50 for each dollar invested.
Backing for the project was officially unanimous. True, there were grumblings among the railroads, who opposed the canal because it would compete with them and possibly force their rates down. And it was opposed by the chambers of commerce of 35 West Texas towns and cities, which argued that few people even along the Trinity would benefit. They argued that water project money was far more urgently needed in arid West Texas.
That opposition didn't carry much weight. In 1965, with the help of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Trinity River Project was authorized for construction.
The project was to include the canal, for what later was set as a cost of $1.1 billion. Other parts, totaling half a billion dollars, included stream channelization for four parts of the river, $135 million; a massive reservoir at Tennessee Colony midway down the river, $332 million; and a pipeline to carry water from Tennessee Colony back to Fort Worth for re-use, $109 million.
To transform the narrow, winding Trinity into a navigable river, the Corps proposed 21 locks and three dams on the river to create a watery stairway of pools deep enough for barges with a nine-foot draft. It would have to be 200 feet wide so that barges going in opposite directions could pass each other. That meant at least doubling the width at its upper end, and straightening the bends so the barges (not the most maneuverable of vessels) would not have to twist and turn to follow the existing river.
Bridges, of course, would have to be raised to allow room for barges to get under them. And so new bridges over the Trinity built since the late 1960's were built higher than they otherwise would have been; by early 1973, seven bridges had been constructed to accommodate the barge traffic expected to be moving under them by 1985.
The Corps said the canal would carry primarily sand and gravel, with iron, steel and grains making up most of the rest of the payloads. Sand and gravel is getting scarce in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it would be cheaper, the Corps said, to ship it by barge than by rail. Dallas doesn't have any heavy industry to speak of, so there would not have been much market for shipping out heavy finished goods.
The local sponsor for the federal project was the Trinity River Authority, a state agency whose directors are appointed by the governor of Texas. It had a somewhat interlocking relationship with the chamber-of-commerce style Trinity Improvement Association: Ben Carpenter and Amon Carter Jr. are on the boards of both groups; almost every director of the River Authority holds a similar position on the Improvement Association; and the River Authority's general manager, David Brune, is president of the Improvement Association.
Among the canal's supporters were incumbent Dallas Congressmen Earle Cabell, a Democrat, and Jim Collins, a Republican; Fort Worth Congressman Jim Wright, a Democrat; newly elected Democratic Congressman Dale Milford of the new Mid-Cities Congressional District; Dallas Mayor Wes Wise; Fort Worth Mayor Sharkey Stovall; and virtually all of the Dallas downtown business establishment represented by the traditionally influential Citizens Charter Association.
The pro-canal forces, listing virtually every traditional leader in Dallas among their supporters in large advertisements, were led by Tom Unis, a former Dallas City Councilman and former head of the powerful Citizens Charter Association.
Dallas in action. Dallas together. The ducks were lined up, the way they had been on the State Fair, on school desegregation, and on local elections for forty years. The Dallas leadership could almost see those barges from every country in the world, right there in north Texas. Houston's one advantage, neutralized. It was the dream of a century of boosterism coming true.
During the late 1950's and on into the 1960's, a boy named Jim Bush was growing up in Kerens, Navarro County, a few miles from the Trinity.
Bush hiked along the river, which cleansed itself to some extent of Dallas and Fort Worth pollution by the time it reached his home, 60 or 70 miles downriver. He and his friends fished in it, camped beside it, boated down it. They tramped through the forests that line its floodplains, trees left by farmers to keep their fields from washing away.
Bush and his friends liked the river as it was.
In Dallas during those years, an owlish looking attorney, Ned Fritz, carried on a lonely battle trying to protect some of the natural areas in Dallas and the surrounding countryside from the ravages of development.
Fritz, a bird-watching, heels-in-the-ground, no-holds-barred environmentalist, preferred to leave the grounds of his own three-acre Dallas homesite in the natural condition he remembered when he had picnicked there years earlier as a student at Southern Methodist University.
He opposed channelization of Bachman Creek, which cuts through his property. The channelization had been called for by others living along the creek, who had built their houses in its floodplain and wanted protection.
Fritz won that battle.
He staunchly defended the sanctity of his natural setting against the City of Dallas, which attempted to force him to cut the "weeds" in his yard and put in grass like everyone else. They may be weeds to you, Fritz in effect replied, but to me, they're nature.
He won that battle too.
