Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Quintana, TX

Quintana is a tiny incorporated town in southern Brazoria County, sitting on Quintana Beach at the mouth of the Brazos River, directly across the harbor channel from Surfside Beach and about two miles southeast of Freeport.

The town's history reaches back to 1528, when survivors of the Spanish Narváez expedition came ashore near the mouth of the Brazos.

Stephen F. Austin's colonists landed the schooner Lively at Quintana in 1821, and Austin had the town laid out in 1833, naming it for Mexican general Andrés Quintana, who had supported his colonization efforts.

Quintana was a major seaport for Austin's colony in the 1830s, home to the trading firm of McKinney, Williams and Company, one of early Texas's most important businesses.

In antebellum Texas, Quintana was a favorite vacation spot for wealthy plantation families, who built a row of fine homes along the beach ridge.

A Confederate fort at Quintana guarded the mouth of the Brazos during the Civil War and was bombarded by federal gunboats.

Quintana first got a post office in 1853, and in 1891 its residents voted thirty-seven to nineteen to incorporate the town.

Hurricanes repeatedly shattered Quintana: the 1900 Galveston storm swept the Brazoria County coast nearly clean, and the 1915 hurricane reduced the town to a virtual ghost town.

In 1929 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dug a new channel to the Gulf, and the completion of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway turned Quintana into a man-made island.

Quintana is one of the smallest incorporated towns in Texas, with just 26 residents at the 2020 census, down from 56 in 2010.