Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Port O'Connor, TX

Port O'Connor is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Calhoun County, Texas, sitting on Matagorda Bay at the end of State Highway 185, roughly midway between Galveston and Corpus Christi.

It began in the late 19th century as a fishing settlement with the considerably more honest name of Alligator Head.

Port O'Connor was formally laid out in 1909 by the Calhoun Cattle Company on the 70,000-acre Alligator Head Ranch, and it was named for landowner Thomas M. O'Connor, whose family ranch holdings surrounded the townsite.

The railroad reached Port O'Connor by 1911, and by 1914 it had become a summer resort terminus with a hotel, a bathing and dance pavilion, three general stores, two fish and oyster plants, a bank and an ice plant, while local farmers shipped figs and citrus fruit through its Fig Orchards Company.

In its early resort years excursion trains ran to Port O'Connor on weekends and an estimated 10,000 tourists visited every summer.

Port O'Connor has been struck by four hurricanes since it was settled — the 1919 storm destroyed the town, storms hit again in 1942 and 1945, and Hurricane Carla came ashore at Port O'Connor in 1961 and leveled its five-block downtown.

The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway reached Port O'Connor in 1939, linking the town by inland water channel to Corpus Christi and New Orleans.

The 2020 census counted 954 year-round residents in Port O'Connor living in 433 households, down from 1,253 residents in 2010.

Sportfishing and tourism are Port O'Connor's main industries, with shrimping close behind — anglers target redfish, speckled trout and flounder in the bays, and hunters come for duck, geese and alligator.

From Port O'Connor, boats reach Matagorda Island, an entirely undeveloped barrier island preserve watched over by a Civil War-era lighthouse, and the historic Pass Cavallo inlet offshore was the route where French explorer La Salle's fleet was wrecked in the 1680s.