By Marie Hughes, director of the Chambers County Museum at Wallisville
In 1931, on a sprawling site in Houston, Texas, that is currently the University of Houston campus, the Port City Stockyards opened as a terminal market for the Gulf Coast cattle market. The stockyard was the culmination of the vision of one man endowed with a remarkable ability to see the need of his time and turn his dream into reality. That man was James W. Sartwelle.
A Dream Born Out of Tragedy
Not unlike many great ideas, J.W.’s vision was one born out of tragedy. On Dec. 10, 1924, a bitter blast from the north brought bone-chilling temperatures that held his ranch in Matagorda County hostage for days. By the time the wintry assault ended, the carcasses of 1,500 head of Sartwelle cattle that had been exposed with no refuge in sight lay frozen on the vast prairie.
One can only imagine the heartache as J.W. surveyed the unimaginable loss of his herd littering the old Spanish land grant that had sustained his family for generations. But true to the pioneer spirit that pulsed through his veins, he processed his loss, wiped away his tears, gathered his family and belongings, and forged a new legacy in Houston, Texas, in 1925.
In Houston, J.W. studied law, passed the bar and established a successful real estate company, but his heart still longed for the earthy smell of cattle and scents of the land that forever bound him heart and soul to the cattle industry. His evenings were spent contemplating how to improve the cattle market in the Gulf Coast area.
He knew the salt grass prairie, blessed with an abundance of water and sweet prairie grass, was prime real estate for cattle, but the Gulf Coast area was not in close proximity to the cattle markets, and most of the cattle were not suited for the brutal Gulf Coast environment.
Bill White of the White Ranch once told me, “This country is high rainfall, poor forage quality, tremendous parasite load and insect problems, and so you have to have Brahman influenced cattle.”
The Sartwelle family were pioneer breeders of registered Brahman cattle, establishing the Sartwelle Brothers Ranch in 1920.
A Market Close to Home
In 1931, when the Great Depression was ramping up and banks were failing, J.W.’s late-night musings gave birth to a cattleman’s dream. While those in the Bread Belt were choking on the dust of a parched land, coastal ranchers were filled with pride at the sight of the beautiful cloud of dust rising beneath the hooves of their cattle as they entered the Port City Stockyards. Finally, a market close to home.
In an interview with “The Vision, Texas Cowmen,” J.D. “Bubba” Sartwelle Jr., president of Port City Stockyards until his death, recalled the need for such a facility.
“A market in the Gulf Coast area was absolutely a necessity. We were putting cattle on a train to Fort Worth and even before that we barged a lot of cattle to New Orleans. New Orleans was pretty much a central market and that was way in the early 1900s. So, there was a need for some organized marketing for the Gulf Coast livestock people.”
The stockyards were designed by someone who understood the challenges of handling cattle, and that knowledge was reflected in the layout.
“When this place was built, the man who built it, C.A. Mavis, who was an icon in this end of the world, was moxy enough to build it with big ten-foot-wide alleys for easier handling etc. It was built by a cowman that knew how to handle cattle and therefore was the best that we had in this end of the world. And it lent itself to being able to sell three days a week instead of just one day a week.”
Memories of the Early Stockyards
For W.C. “Billy” Sartwelle, memories of the stockyards are intertwined with time spent alongside his grandfather.
“My first memory of the stockyards is basically riding with my grandfather to the ranch in Palacios,” Billy reminisced. “He was a great storyteller, but he also tried to impart to us things that were going on around us. He said the main reason for starting the stockyards was formed when he came from Palacios where he was ranching and saw all those pens that were sitting there in Houston for the railroad. He knew the railroad really wanted to get rid of them and he knew exactly what he needed to do, create a market, a stockyard that could handle cattle on the Gulf Coast and especially Brahman cattle that he thought would be merchandized through these markets.”
In those early days, the railroad played a central role in moving cattle, while commission companies handled the business of buying and selling livestock.
“At that point and time, most of the cattle came in through the railroad and people like Mr. Scott, Dave Scott and his dad, or his grandpa started a commission company on the yards. A commission company was the heart of the stockyards. The stockyards were simply the pens and the scales and the facilities that operated the stockyards. They operated under strict guidelines of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921.”
Billy compared the relationship between the stockyards and the commission companies to the workings of a financial exchange.
“The stockyard would receive the cattle and do whatever they had to do to deliver them to the commission man. The commission man had seats, it’s kind of like seats on a stock exchange, they were the commission people. The stockyards were more or less the New York Stock Exchange, if you can think of it that way.”
At that point in the conversation, Dave Scott interjected, “Port City had a seat on the stock exchange, and the only one.”
“That’s right,” Billy added. “Andy Cohen and J.D. Sartwelle. We had a seat on the Chicago Merc and then our clearing member was G.H. Gill and Company. I went when dad and I went to Chicago to see Swift. When I went over to the Merc, I saw Mr. Harris and we went all over the exchange. That was wild, it’s a wild place, you think selling cattle is wild . . . you ought to go there!”
The comparison to a stock exchange extended beyond the trading floor. Behind every sale was a carefully organized system of handling livestock, maintaining records and settling accounts.
“Once the cattle came in, the commission people sold the cattle, weighed the cattle, and the stockyards company could pen the cattle and hold them for the buyers, then ship them out when they needed to go,” Billy continued. “The commission people would then go to their offices in the exchange building, just like the New York Exchange. The stockyards owned these, and these commission people had their business in there and they would clear the money, they would write the checks.”
The commission firms also operated within established rules governing what they could charge.
“Whatever charges there were, they would set those up, like tariff charges. You had to have certification for tariff charges. You could only charge so much for whatever, so that’s what the commission people did. It was a symbiotic thing. I think we ended up with seven commission firms on the yard.”
“There were thirteen at one time,” Dave Scott interjected.
Although J.W. Sartwelle supplied the vision, Billy pointed out that bringing the stockyards to life required the financial backing of others.
“This was my grandfather’s dream,” he continued, “but the financing came from folks out in the country. Along with it the stockyards created a packing company next to it that served the Houston area.”
Growing Up Around the Cattle Business
For J.D. “Jimmy” Sartwelle III, the fourth generation of the family to be involved in Port City Stockyards, the memories begin after the operation’s move to Sealy.
“I was born after the move out to Sealy,” Jimmy said. “My earliest memories would be the early to mid-70s. I can still close my eyes and walk around the corner and see Mr. Burney Reichers sitting up there calling pens there at Brenham.”
Those childhood memories include the sights, sounds and sometimes overwhelming activity of a busy cattle auction.
“I can remember getting sent to the box to take a message and feeling like that was the last place in the world I wanted to be because it was like you said, Uncle Billy, when you were in that amphitheater in Sealy and you were running 3,500 head of cattle on a Wednesday, you just felt like everybody in the world was in there.”
Jimmy’s education in the cattle business came not only from his family but also from the experienced cattlemen who worked the yards.
“Everything I know about a cow I learned as much from my dad and from you, Dave, and Uncle Rayford, (Jay Rayford Smith), Jr Hartlage. My first job around there was being stuck to you when we’d go sort those 1,000 or 1,500 head of cattle that had mostly come in off the coast.”
He recalled watching the cattle being sorted and learning the skills that came naturally to the men who had spent their lives working with livestock.
“They weren’t tagged; they were sorted into lots and deals. I was just fascinated; I’d stand out in the hall with a hotshot and catch cattle as they came through. He’s on the front set of the scales at the sorting gate,” Jimmy said, pointing to Dave. “Leroy Winkleman most of the time was on the back set.”
For Jimmy, working alongside Dave was particularly memorable, and he wasn’t shy about explaining why.
“I liked when you were there, Dave,” Jimmy confessed. “When you weren’t there I got dad; dad was a hell of a lot meaner to us kids than you were. You were always pretty gentle on us but you’re the one that I learned from.”
Among the lessons he remembered most vividly was Dave’s remarkable ability to identify cattle as they moved through the sorting gates, even under difficult conditions.
“That was the worst place in the world to see an animal because you’d have that sun right under the end of that shed. I’d still sit there and watch you watch mixed sex lots come through there and be able to pick a steer or a bull from a heifer from looking at its head. But every great once in a while, we’d wind up in the back and say, Scooter, we got a heifer in here. He goes, she sure has a bull head. And we’d cut her out and we’d move her back to the heifers and we’d cut her with them.”
Billy attributed that skill to Dave’s years of experience at the old stockyards.
“Well, that’s because he was on the old yards for years,” Billy interjected. “When we unloaded something or it came down the alley, it had steers and Herefords mixed. And believe me, on the gate down there, they could work it pretty quick,” he said, giving Dave a nod.
The Freeze That Changed Everything
Dave Scott III of the G.D. Scott Cattle Company shared with John Lindgren of The Vision, Texas Cowmen that during the 1924 freeze, there were about 25,000 head of cattle down on the salt grass, and the freeze killed virtually all of them.
“My daddy was a senior in high school at that time and he said, ‘I remember the date, it was the 10th of December, because the Christmas holiday was going to start the next week.’ He said he spent all of his Christmas holidays down with the crew skinning cattle. The hides were worth quite a bit back then and they skinned cattle ’til it got too hot. They said you could go from the causeway at Galveston all the way down the coast and walk from cow to cow and never step on the ground,” Dave recalled with amazement.
The devastation of that winter would become part of the story behind the creation of Port City Stockyards, a venture that brought together two families whose ties to the cattle industry would span generations.
“My first memory of the Port City Stockyards is, my daddy didn’t get home ’til late at night,” Dave chuckled during an interview with The Bryan Museum. “I was told as we went along how the stockyards evolved. Mr. Sartwelle wanted to have a market, and he came to my grandfather and said if he would help gather the money and everything that he would also be able to start a commission company and it would be a company that would benefit our family for several years. So, he agreed to help.”
With the vision established, the next challenge was finding the money to make it a reality.
“Those two set out and contacted ranchers all over the area to try and raise money. I don’t remember how much they raised, but they went to First National Bank and got a loan for $50,000 to build the stockyards.”
Building a Market for Gulf Coast Cattlemen
In a Jan. 21, 1929, publication of the Houston Chronicle, Dave Scott I stated that the territory described as Houston’s territory on account of the rate advantage was in a chaotic, inefficient and wasteful state.
“One would have to go back 70 years to find worse conditions. We want to establish adequate, modern, and open livestock at Houston where cattlemen can offer and buy livestock in a proper facility where the buyers can obtain supplies without running them from South Texas or going to Fort Worth where other open markets are used by cattlemen in South Texas.”
Scott illustrated the inefficiency of the existing system by describing cattle that traveled hundreds of miles only to be purchased and brought back toward the area where they had originated.
“For instance, a man from South Texas will go to Fort Worth and buy cattle that were shipped from South Texas, which passed through Houston on their way to Fort Worth. The local demand for livestock products combined with that of Galveston, Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur aggregates a very sizeable tonnage that will support a good market, at the same time, enable us to have a stocker and trading market. The project has been submitted to cattlemen from Orange to Kerrville and from Madisonville to the Gulf.”
The vision attracted support from cattlemen and Houston businessmen alike.
“The first meeting of the company to establish the business was in February 1931, at the Chamber of Commerce building downtown,” Jimmy added. “When you look at the organizing documents, it was a ‘who’s who’ of who was big in the cattle industry on the Gulf Coast as well as lots of merchantmen out of Houston that bought into the idea that if Houston was going to be great in one thing it needed to be great in all things.”
The existing railroad facilities provided an opportunity to establish a market without requiring cattlemen to ship their livestock all the way to New Orleans.
“The cattle pens at the Houston railroad were feed, water, and rest pens for cattle being transported from South Texas to New Orleans,” Dave explained. “When they started talking about building the stockyards and people were unloading cattle at the Houston pens, my grandfather said, ‘Hey, if I can sell these cattle right here at these pens, would you let me?’ So, they sold a few like that and then the yards got built.”
However, the railroad’s freight charges initially presented an obstacle.
“They were still shipping cattle to New Orleans, but more of them were dropping off at Port City and selling them there, but they still had to pay the freight all the way to New Orleans, whether they did or not. I don’t know who did it, whether it was Mr. Sartwelle or somebody else, but they got the railroad to give them the privilege of the market, that’s what they called it. So, if you billed your cattle to New Orleans and sold them in Houston, you got a refund. That’s when the business picked up. If it hadn’t been for that, it would have been a lot slower going.”
Transportation was a different world in those days, long before trucks and trailers became commonplace.
“Of course, there weren’t any roads, or trucks, or anything, that’s what you’ve got to remember,” Dave laughed.
“That was a big point,” Billy Sartwelle added. “Most of the cattle were gathered up in the country and you drove them to the railhead and they came here. Eventually, the freeways came in with the trucks and that finally dropped a lot of our volume at the old stockyards.”
A City Within a City
As Port City Stockyards grew, so did the businesses surrounding it. The facility became much more than a place to buy and sell cattle.
“The family lore of the company, the description always was it was a city within the city,” Jimmy said. “On the same day they organized the Stockyard Company, they organized Port City Packing Company as well.”
“Burton, Dixon, and Blue Ribbon would be the three other packing plants adjacent to the Port City Plant,” Dave noted. “Armour and Swift were always major buyers at the yard.”
But behind the stockyards and packing plants was another ambition that had remained close to J.W. Sartwelle’s heart: improving the cattle that could thrive along the Gulf Coast.
“Another part of the family lore is, this whole thing started from J.W.’s dream of getting the Brahman cattle started,” Jimmy continued. “He figured the quickest way to add value to land on the Gulf Coast was to actually have some cattle that were adapted to it.”
The effort to promote Brahman cattle was not always welcomed by established livestock interests.
“There’s a story of he and the Hudgins family hauling cattle to Fort Worth to exhibit at the Fort Worth Stock Show in 1922-23, and the folks at Fort Worth would take your money but wouldn’t even let them in the building, wouldn’t let them come in and exercise until the middle of the night.”
According to Jimmy, the experience made quite an impression on J.W.
“I think it cheesed him off pretty good,” Jimmy said with a chuckle.
Rather than accept the treatment, J.W. envisioned a livestock exposition where Brahman cattle would have a place of their own.
“In all of his research that he (J.W.) did he figured every great marketing center had a major livestock exposition that was with it. The Herefords had Denver, and the Brahman’s were going to have a show of their own that’s down here,” Jimmy stated.
Memories of the Livestock Show
Billy remembered accompanying his grandfather to the livestock show during the 1950s, although the trips began with an unusual responsibility for a boy his age.
“I remember going down there in the fifties with him, J.W., to a Stock Show on a Saturday,” Billy recalled. “He didn’t like to drive because he had a terrible skin condition that was very painful for him. When we got old enough, 12, 13, we’d drive him. That happened to be very dangerous, but anyway, we did,” he added with a laugh.
Once they arrived, the boys were free to explore, although their grandfather apparently had ways of keeping track of them.
“They had it at the lot right there next to him. He walks in there and turns us loose to go play. We’d go everywhere around there, but we found out pretty quick, if he needed you, one of the cops or somebody around there said, ‘Hey, kid, you’ve got to go back….’ I said, I don’t understand, what do you mean I have to go back? He said, ‘Your grandpa needs you to go to so-and-so.'”
It wasn’t until one memorable moment at the show that Billy began to understand his grandfather’s standing in the cattle industry.
“So, I did, and then grandpa had a show that was going on, and he’s in a box, and all of a sudden the spotlight comes on. Here he is and he’s got a microphone, and he’s talking and I’m about trying to hide. I said, what happened, is he in trouble? I didn’t realize he ran the damn place,” Billy laughed.
Those early experiences eventually led Billy into the livestock business himself.
“From there, of course, I got involved with commercial steers and a few other things. Just being down there and seeing people like Mason Briscoe and other people doing their thing, and of course, dad was involved in it completely. That’s my early remembrance of it. It really blew me away. I wondered why they let him in that lot so easy, he’s kind of a big deal!” Billy said with a laugh.
Dave had his own childhood memories of the livestock show, including one encounter with a bull that he never forgot.
“My dad spent a lot of time up there, but I wasn’t privileged to go up there with him,” Dave noted. “I remember when I was five, six years old, I went up there, and Hudgins had their show cattle there, and dad stopped and talked to him. A guy grabbed me and said, you want to ride this bull? And I said, oh, wow. He set me up on there, my only words were, my mother told me not to ride any bulls, and so they lifted me back down. That was my first experience at the livestock show.”
As he grew older, the Saturday horse sales became another opportunity to spend time among the cattlemen.
“Then I started going on Saturday when they’d have the horse sale, and every cowman in the country would be there, so we had to go to that, that was a real good event.”
Learning the Business From the Ground Up
For Dave, the stockyards eventually became more than a place to visit. They became his classroom.
“I wanted to start working there when I was about 10, but I didn’t get to go until I was about 14 to work in the summertime just to be a flunky and wash water troughs on Friday. I was knocking down 30 bucks a week, so I was getting along.”
Working alongside experienced cattlemen gave him an education that could not have been learned from books.
“As I got a little older, I learned from the people that made it happen. And that was my education there in the marketing businesses, what made good markets and what made bad ones, and we’re sure going to have some of both,” he added with abject honesty.
Dave returned to the business full time as a young man.
“I was 20 when I came back full time, so that would have been ’58.”
“And you rode her out ’til the end,” Jimmy added softly.
Billy remembered Dave as a tireless worker who could handle cattle with remarkable skill.
“All I remember is seeing him running down the alley chasing after cattle and then going to the scale, pushing them up the scale. He was a good gate man. He could cut cattle all day long,” Billy said of Dave’s work ethic. “That’s my experience with him growing up.”
Jimmy recalled that Bubba had come to appreciate Dave’s abilities at the gate.
“He (Bubba) was happier with you on the gate than himself. But age had a little bit of privileges along with it,” Jimmy added with a chuckle.
Changing Times in the Cattle Industry
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, changes in transportation and livestock marketing were beginning to reshape the industry.
“The business began to change in the late 50s, early 60s,” Jimmy stated. “I always asked my dad what the biggest innovation in his lifetime in the cattle industry and he was didn’t even pause, he said a gooseneck trailer was the biggest thing that happened and it kind of democratized cattle marketing.”
The growth of livestock markets closer to ranchers, coupled with the increasing use of trailers, began to change the role of the large terminal stockyards.
“There was a period of time there in the 60s when we were still in Houston that I think the older folks recognized the handwriting on the wall,” Billy pointed out.
It was during this time that the stockyards began venturing into the auction business.
“They rigged the number three scale and ran an auction ring out of it. We had sales there once a week, but that was later down the line.”
The company also found new opportunities beyond the domestic cattle market.
“During the 60s, we did a lot of export,” Billy clarified. “We had the only export facility in Houston that was certified by USDA. Most of the cattle basically would be shipped to Miami to load out of there and go to Central and South America.”
When Cattle Took to the Skies
One of the more unusual chapters in Port City’s history involved shipping cattle by airplane.
“In 65, we started flying cattle, and we flew 350-360 cattle down to Tegucigalpa, Honduras,” Billy stated. “We flew every night, I was at the packing house, but I was pulled out to load the cattle. Duty was started about 2 o’clock in the morning and we’d load the airplanes with 15, 20 head of cattle, primarily Brahman cattle, going to Tegucigalpa, Honduras.”
The operation required careful coordination, with flights departing during the early morning hours and the aircraft returning to prepare for another load.
“They’d take off at Hobby about 2 in the morning when the air got real good and thick enough to go. They’d go fly and then they’d come back that night and disinfect the plane. Then about 1.30 or 2, we’d go out and we’d load the cattle again. They were already inspected, then we tagged the truck to be sure it’s sealed. The veterinarians would follow it out to Hobby, then we’d load those cattle again. We’d load it every night for a week, except for Sunday night.”
The export business also included shipping hundreds of cattle overseas by sea, an undertaking that presented an entirely different set of challenges.
“We had a USDA contract that went to Food for Peace or one of those kind of programs. We would ship cows that we had bought, we did all testing on them on the Guidi’s Italian ship out of the port of Houston. I think we ended up putting eight or nine hundred head, which was way too much but they had waived the space requirement.”
Loading that many cattle onto a ship was no small task, and the voyage itself carried considerable risks.
“We had to go out and buy more cows just to finish out the order and then they shipped them on out of here. Of course, the feed and all the hay had to be put on and then we shipped them. They loaded them unloaded them at Luxembourg or wherever, but they had quite a bit of death loss with it, which was expected. But that was the last time we loaded cows, Brahman cows, I mean on a ship.”
Even getting the cattle aboard could turn into an adventure.
“The ships weren’t too easy to load, believe me. In fact, they had some, some of them jumped off before we got them loaded because the stevedores wouldn’t let us shut the gates.”
The resulting escape sent cattle scattering through the Port of Houston and beyond.
“They flushed them back to us, and then they got out at the Port of Houston, so we were chasing cows all over the Port of Houston, through backyards and everything, under clotheslines. Of course, the motorcycle police, they loved that. They always did when they got any cattle out on the Gulf Freeway. They loved to go out and round them up. But, of course, then the lawyers started calling, you know. So, the export business was okay, but it was kind of a little tough at times,” Billy recalled with a laugh.
Dave remembered hearing an even more extraordinary story about a shipment of Brahman cattle by air.
“I remember hearing a story that they were flying about five Bramers,” Dave recalled, “and they had too much weight and were going to have to dump one to get the weight off. There were some fishermen out there in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, and here comes this bull flying down,” Dave laughed.
“It was pretty much the wild west in those days,” Jimmy noted.
The End of an Era in Houston
At its height, Port City Stockyards was among the busiest livestock markets in the country.
“Port City was pretty much the largest calf market in the United States in the early 50s,” Jimmy declared.
“We had a lot of 5,000 head days at the yard, and it was dry, dry, dry,” Dave recalled.
But the changes that had begun in the 1950s continued to gain momentum, and the stockyards’ location in Houston was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
“The gooseneck trailers came along in the 50s . . . there’s a proliferation of livestock markets out in the country . . . we’re locked in on the south side of Houston with the University of Houston as a neighbor . . . the handwriting’s pretty much on the wall at that point,” Jimmy reflected.
By 1968, the iconic Port City Stockyards had relocated to Sealy, Texas, where operations continued for nearly half a century before the property was sold in 2014.
“The Port City Stockyards had just received the money for the land that was condemned by the city of Houston and were able to purchase the land in Sealy, and it proved to be a good investment,” Dave said.
The decision to continue the business rather than distribute the proceeds from the Houston property was one that Dave believed deserved recognition.
“I want to give your dad, and your granddad credit,” Dave said to Billy and Jimmy, respectively. “They could have taken that money and divided it up amongst the family and let everybody just live happily ever after, instead they pursued the idea of staying in the livestock market business.”
A Legacy Beyond the Stockyards
For the families who built and operated Port City Stockyards, the legacy extended far beyond cattle sales, packing plants and auction rings. The business forged friendships and family relationships that endured long after the final cattle passed through its gates.
“I think one of the lasting stories and the lasting legacy of a business that ceased operations more than 15 years ago would be the friendships and the family relationships that exist not only between the Sartwelles and the Scotts that are four and five generations deep now but with folks like Bill White and those who came before him,” Jimmy recalled fondly.
The loyalty to the stockyards was reflected in the generations of families who continued to serve the company.
“There was a member, a representative of the Hudgins family on the board of Port City Stockyards everyday Port City Stockyards existed. When it closed, everyone on the board was a descendant of one of the founders.”
For Jimmy, one of the most poignant reminders of those enduring bonds came on the day his father was laid to rest.
“One of my favorite pictures is on one of the hardest days of my life, the day we buried my dad, and all the rest of y’all stood behind the casket and had the last board meeting,” Jimmy concluded wistfully, bringing the story of Port City to a fitting and poignant close.
Often referred to by historians as the “crucible of the Gulf Coast cattle industry,” Port City left an indelible mark on Texas agriculture. Though the dust raised by countless hooves has long since settled, its legacy endures in the ranching families it served and the Texas cattle industry it helped shape.
