Quote:
Originally Posted by pj3000
I don't know about "dominant", but it was the slighly larger port city to Houston's railroad hub up until the turn of the century. But Houston was already surpassing Galveston in size by the time the hurricane hit. But it was more of a symbiotic relationship, and once massive dredging of the bayous between the two cities began in the 1870s to create the ship channel, Houston was on its way to become the alpha.
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Houston and Galveston would probably have ended up how Dallas-Fort Worth are today. Dallas is the more dominant of the two but FW is still pretty significant. Galveston could have grown to 10x its size (~500k) had it not been for the hurricane and Houston could have been slightly smaller. The hurricane shifted the population/ economic balance further inland.