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Houston, inland port city, in Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery counties, that is the seat (1836) of Harris county, southeastern Texas, U.S. It is linked by the Houston Ship Channel to the Gulf of Mexico and the Intracoastal Waterway at Galveston, 50 miles (80 km) southeast. Houston is the state’s most populous city and the fourth largest city in the United States. Its skyscrapers rise from the unrelievedly flat Gulf Coastal Plain, which at Houston lies at an elevation of about 55 feet (17 metres) above sea level and is dissected by a series of bayous. The region’s climate is warm and humid, and the city is noted for its hot, sticky summers. In addition to Galveston, other major cities in the Houston metropolitan area include Baytown, League City, Missouri City, Pasadena, Sugar Land, and Texas City. Inc. 1837. Area 601 square miles (1,559 square km). Pop. (2010) 2,099,451; Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown Metro Area, 5,946,800; (2020) 2,304,580; Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land Metro Area, 7,122,240.
The first settlement in the area, Harrisburg (1826), was destroyed in April 1836 by the Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna in pursuit of Sam Houston and the Texas army. A week later, outside the present city at the Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Anna was captured and Texas was freed. In August 1836 two New York land speculators, the brothers Augustus C. and John K. Allen, bought a site near burned-out Harrisburg and began advertising the place as the future “great interior commercial emporium of Texas.” Two months later John Allen persuaded the first Congress of the Republic of Texas, in session at Columbia, to move to his town, named for the first elected president of Texas, Sam Houston. The maneuver was later denounced, and the government stayed there only two years (1837–39).
Mud-bogged and beset by yellow fever epidemics, the town grew slowly as a cotton-shipping port; the first railroad arrived in 1853. During the American Civil War it became a haven for Southerners running the Union naval blockade. Briefly threatened in 1862 when Union forces captured Galveston Island (which was soon recaptured by the Confederates), Houston in 1863 became the headquarters for the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department (Texas and what was then New Mexico Territory). Segregation became a problem after the war, with separate neighbourhoods developing for whites, Hispanics, and African Americans. Racial tensions resulted in serious rioting in 1917, when black U.S. Army soldiers were stationed in the city; nearly 20 people were killed.
Houston developed as a rail centre, with 12 railways by 1891. After a devastating hurricane and flood in 1900 destroyed Galveston’s port facilities, Houston emerged as the state’s leading port. The first dock had been built in 1840, and widening and deepening of Buffalo Bayou (now part of the Houston Ship Channel) had begun in 1869. By the early 1980s the port, then the third largest in the United States in tonnage moved, was handling more than 80 million tons of foreign, coastal, and canal shipping annually. Oil, discovered in the area in 1901, brought considerable industrial development, triggering the city’s expansion and prosperity from its 19th-century economic base of cotton and lumber. The completion of the Houston Ship Channel in 1914 led to the establishment of refineries along it in the 1920s and ’30s.
World War II brought shipbuilding and petrochemical industries to Houston, and chemicals remained important after the war ended. Land annexed in 1948 nearly tripled the city’s area. In 1961 the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973), the command post for flights by U.S. astronauts, was opened near Clear Lake, about 25 miles (40 km) southeast of downtown, making Houston a focus of the nation’s space program. Houston experienced an economic boom in the 1970s and became a world leader in the energy business; hundreds of companies located their headquarters there. Energy largely supported the city’s economy until the oil industry went bust in the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s the city had recovered, although it sustained another blow when Enron Corp. (headquartered there) collapsed in 2001. The city hosted the Republican National Convention in 1992, and the downtown area underwent a resurgence in the late 1990s as new entertainment venues opened.
Houston’s rapid expansion after World War II was accompanied by increases in air and water pollution and urban sprawl. In addition, flooding has been a recurring problem, although measures to control it were made after serious floods in 1929 and 1935. In 2001 Tropical Storm Allison killed 22 people in the area, damaged office buildings and thousands of homes, and caused widespread flooding in the city. Hurricane Ike, though responsible for far fewer deaths, caused similar damage to Houston shortly after making landfall in nearby Galveston in September 2008. Hurricane Harvey, the strongest storm to make landfall in the United States in more than a decade, drenched the Houston area in August 2017. The city received more than 16 inches (over 400 mm) of rain in a 24-hour period, and catastrophic flooding claimed several lives.
In politics, Houston made news in December 2009 when city controller Annise Parker was elected mayor. Parker, who campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility, was the first openly gay individual to be elected mayor of a large U.S. city.