Dr. Patricia Bixel

William Randolph Hearst organized a fundraiser bazaar, and wealthy people donated items for sale.

There were silver and watches and jewels and fur coats.

Mark Twain did an evening of entertainment.

Queen Victoria sent a document of support.

And over $50,000 was raised specifically to repair the Galveston Orphan's Home, which was finally rededicated in 1902.

But yeah, the New York population stepped up.

with its connections to Galveston and provided a very public and very helpful contribution to rebuilding the island.

Well, it's interesting.

After the storm, there is a general consensus that obviously they need to rebuild.

Galveston's not going anywhere.

The port's still there.

This is a time technologically before you have a significant number of ports around the Gulf of Mexico.

The technology doesn't exist to dredge deep channels up to Houston or Corpus Christi or a lot of the places that will eventually have significant ports.

So Galveston is still, from a port perspective, the only game in town.

And so the city knows that it needs to rebuild and reconstruct itself.

Politically, the city had not been particularly well run, and they have defaulted on some bonds.

They know that it's going to be very, very difficult to get the funding they need to rebuild the island and the city until they get their sort of political house in order.

In Galveston, there's another group of people that's very important called the Deepwater Committee.

And this was a group of very wealthy men whose primary focus was the development and maintenance of the port.

And they obviously understand that Galveston is going to need a lot of funding in order to reconstruct and rebuild.