Beaumont, TX news and local guide

In its early years Beaumont was a small center for cattle raisers and farmers. With an active river port by the 1880s, it became an important lumber and rice-milling town, and its lumber boom, at its peak in the late 19th century, was fed by the rebuilding of the railroads after the Civil War. Joseph Eloi Broussard founded the Beaumont Rice Mill in 1892, the first commercially successful rice mill in Texas, and in 1898 he co-founded the Beaumont Irrigation Company to water the rice fields. The Spindletop gusher of 1901 showed that a huge oil field lay under and around the city. Several energy companies grew up in Beaumont, and the area quickly became one of the country's major petrochemical refining centers. With Port Arthur and Orange, Beaumont forms the Golden Triangle, a major industrial region on the Texas Gulf Coast. Sources Wikipedia: Beaumont, Texas