MATAGORDA, Texas - This is not what Stephen F. Austin had in mind for a place that by 1834 was home to about 1,500 people, making it the third-largest city in Texas.

All that's left is a gas station-grocery store, a post office, a couple of churches, an elementary school, a video store and a few other shops, serving a community of about 600 people.

"A guy came in here and asked where was downtown Matagorda," says Margie Ivy, who can see Matagorda's main intersection out the front door of the post office where she works. "I stood here and laughed."

That doesn't mean the place is a ghost town, but it's a far cry from what Texas settlers believed they were building when they began showing up in the late 1820s at the site where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of Mexico's Matagorda Bay about 100 miles southwest of present-day Houston. At one point, it would be the busiest port west of New Orleans.

Now it's primarily a getaway for fishermen and for people with weekend homes along the river or on the nearly deserted broad beach.

In the early 1800s, no one realized how vulnerable the area would be to the violent storms that move inland from the gulf. And the repeated lashings by storms eventually would steal from Matagorda its place as seat of the county that carries the same name, along with the accompanying business - all moving 25 miles inland to a new town to be known as Bay City.

History should have been an indicator to founders Elias Wightman, Hosea League and Ira Ingram, appointed proprietors of Matagorda by Austin.

About 140 years earlier, across the bay, French explorer LaSalle landed with about 200 colonists to establish Fort St. Louis. Ravaged by disease, Indian attacks and unbearable weather, the colony failed and LaSalle was killed while trying to seek help inland. 

Mr. Wightman, who fought in the Revolutionary War, and his family were among the several dozen passengers - most from New York and Connecticut - aboard the first sailing vessel to pull into Matagorda Bay on Jan. 27, 1829. The final leg of their trip from New Orleans, which should have taken seven days, took 31 days, leaving food and water supplies severely depleted, according to documents kept by the Matagorda County Museum.

But that didn't stop the new Texans from following their dreams.

Today, the reminders of Matagorda's storied past dot the landscape.

Ingram wound up the first speaker of the Texas House.

Albert Clinton Horton, who came from Alabama in 1834, became the first lieutenant governor when the Republic of Texas became a state in 1845. He also was a charter trustee of Baylor University, founded the same year, and later served as school president.

Both are buried in the cemetery established north of town in 1830, where they share plots with the likes of Samuel Rhoads Fisher, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and George Morse Collinsworth, commander of the Texans who captured the Mexican garrison at Goliad in 1835.

How much effect the weather had on Matagorda's rise and fall also is evident.

The first Episcopal church in Texas was organized here in 1839 and 10 years later became the headquarters of the Diocese of Texas. In September 1854, the church and much everything else was wiped out by a hurricane.

One of the first Methodist churches in Texas, Matagorda United Methodist, was established in January 1839 by four people who gathered during a howling storm. The church building also was destroyed in the 1854 storm.

In the 20-year period ending in 1891, Matagorda was hit nine times by hurricanes or tropical storms.

And even today, the highlight of a visit to the old post office, built sometime before 1872, is viewing the waterline halfway to the ceiling left by a flood.

By 1894, county residents were convinced that a more central county seat made more sense and they voted to strip Matagorda of its government responsibilities in favor of Bay City.

06/04/2000 By Michael Graczyk / Associated Press

GalvestonBayFishing.com

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