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The time allowed for the completion of the grade-raising work is four years. Two years have passed since it was begun, and fully half of the task has been finished. I asked Mr. Kempner, the financial genius of the new Galveston, how the owners of small homes had been able to get funds to raise them. It was estimated that the cost of the sand-filling, paid by the city, would exceed $2,000,000, and that the cost to individuals of raising their houses would run far above that sum. It seemed to me impossible that without some general scheme of giving financial aid the majority of the small homeowners could meet the cost of raising them. I took it for granted that, lacking some such philanthropic general scheme of aid, many of them must have forfeited their properties. But Mr. Kempner told me it was not so; that the small home-owners of Galveston are all employed steadily at high wages, that they are a superior class of workmen, thrifty and forehanded, and that they had almost without exception met the severe test put upon them without grumbling and without loss. In some districts, Mr. Kempner said, where a group of neighbors were all able-bodied laboring-men, they joined hands, something in the old New England fashion of a neighborhood barn-raising, and helped each other do the work, so that it was not necessary to hire any assistance.
Tremendous Traffic on a Single-Track Viaduct
Meantime, while sea wall and grade-raising are in progress, the business of the city grows with tremendous strides. All the business buildings left vacant after the storm are filled and new ones are going up. The commerce of the port advances by leaps and bounds. The most extraordinary fact in the commercial situation is that practically all of Galveston’s gigantic trade is handled across a single-track railway viaduct two and one-half miles long. This viaduct, connecting the island on which Galveston stands with the mainland across the bay, was the only one of four that was rebuilt after the storm of 1900. It is used by five trunk-line railways for all their passenger and freight business into and out of Galveston. Should it be disabled by storm or fire, the entire traffic of the second exporting city in the Union would have to be suspended until repairs could be made. Galveston wants relief from this condition. She has asked the State Railway Commission to induce the railways interested to build another viaduct, and she hopes before long to have a broad, stable causeway set up, linking island with mainland and affording space for wagons, trolley-lines, and steam railways. It is probable that more business is handled over this single track than over any other of equal length in the world.
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