Weekend in Beaumont? Just up the river from the Gulf on the Neches River, this old Texas city is known for seafood, independent business opportunities, ingenuity that led to the oil boom in Texas, and the freewheeling spirit of millionaires and hobos. It’s been called the Cajun Capital of Texas (by Lonely Planet) and Beaumont is also known to have some rough neighborhoods. I didn’t let that stop me from visiting over a rainy weekend in June. I found this to be a land of startling contrasts, wealth, poverty, slow moving swamps, and excitement. Maybe you will too. It can all be found under a big changeable Texas sky. 

Where Exactly is Beaumont, Texas? 

Beaumont is about an hour and a half drive east of Houston, and was founded in the 1830s back in the days of the Republic of Texas. This was a battle site during the Civil War (the Confederates won against a much larger Union force). 

This is Oil Country

Beaumont was the site of Spindletop, the original Texas oil gusher. Spindletop’s bounty (oil shot out of the ground at reported heights of 160 feet) changed the American economy. The country went from horse-based transit to the automobile in a few short years. Texas’ oil industry was born here, including Gulf Oil, Texaco and others.

What You’ll Need in Beaumont for the Weather

To visit this interesting historical town for the weekend you might want to remember to bring a raincoat or an umbrella. The weather is subtropical and the city is only about 260 miles from the perpetually raining New Orleans. Rain falls almost every day in the summer. Puddles form everywhere, so wear shoes that can get wet. Check the upcoming weather for the average temperature. It’s very likely you will need to think about keeping cool.

During my stay we used both raincoats and a golf umbrella, and my choice of Crocs sandals for footwear saved my less water-resistant shoes from endless puddles. 

Seafood Restaurants in Beaumont

Beaumont is richly supplied with food for meat eaters and pescatarians (fish eaters) and everyone else as well. As you drive up to the city you will find it surrounded on the landward side by cattle ranches, producing a wide variety of beef products and on the other side by the Gulf with the proverbial ‘all the fish in the sea.’ Seafood restaurants in Beaumont include the Schooner, a local tradition dating from the 40’s, as well as Crazy Cajun Beaumont.

For breakfast, I went to a brunch place called The Toasted Yolk. “What does that mean?” I wondered. I found out: It is a breakfast place that serves cocktails — mimosas and such. A mural on the wall said “It’s never too early to get toasted,” or tipsy, I suppose.  The food was good — I skipped the drinks. The ambience reminded me a little of New Orleans, which is famous for a party-positive attitude where you see folks walking down the road with a “go cup” or plastic cup designed for liquor. When at Toasted Yolk the waiter, a Guatemalan dude both younger and shorter than me, gave me the receipt and said “Thank you, mama,” I noted the misuse of  downtown slang — I’m not his mama, I’m more like his grandmama — but somehow, the friendly sentiment came through. People smiled. It was a “I’m okay, you’re okay” kind of place. Eating alone on a Sunday morning, my weekend in Beaumont was made a little brighter by the friendliness.

What to Do in Beaumont? 

Once you’re done filling up on seafood there are numerous interesting recreational opportunities. Perhaps the most unusual is Gator Country, an alligator preserve where a one-time illegal alligator farm has been converted into a refuge. If you go to one of the scheduled feeding presentations you’ll meet local gators Big Al and his “ex-wife” Allie. The history of the place includes some amusing stories. The reptile room is quite well stocked and you may get to hold a snake or a baby alligator. Feeding the alligators hot dogs dangled off a piece of weed whacker twine is not to be missed. Screams ensure but viewers are safe on a porch well above the pond. 

You also may want to visit the Botanic Garden where there is a well put together conservatory (open only on weekdays, but you can see the outside of the Botanic Garden, with rose gardens and Japanese garden, from 7:00 to 7:00 on any day).

Crabbing on the Gulf

Crab fishing is popular with locals. I saw at least a dozen cars pulled over with locals crab fishing in the Gulf on Highway 73 between the Rainbow Bridge and Bridge City, and there are other spots too. You can learn how to try this yourself from this website. Apparently it’s not too difficult but since you would be keeping any crabs of greater than 5 inches in size, this would be an activity for someone who has a kitchen available. 

Museum of the Gulf Coast

If you’re into music history, you can visit the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur and learn more about native daughter Janis Joplin who hailed from around here. Her iconic face with her pink round sunglasses can be seen at various spots around town. The museum has a musician’s hall of fame with 82 popular stars from the Gulf Coast region, going back to early blues players. 

Take a Swamp Tour

Finally you might not think of this but there’s the opportunity to go on an airboat swamp tour. That’s right, you can go on a real airboat and see wild life of various types–particularly waterbirds and alligators. You’ll experience the gulf coast swamp which stretches for hundreds of square miles between here and New Orleans. Try Swamp and Riverboat tours in Orange, or you can book a tour at Gator Country. 

Is Beaumont Dangerous? 

I’ve got it on good authority that in Beaumont, you’ve got to be careful about certain neighborhoods after dark. My son and his girlfriend lived there and they say the apartment had suspicious characters in the parking lot, police visits — and his girlfriend didn’t want to go out after dark. It was so bad they moved to Bridge City. Driving down an attractive neighborhood after visiting Gator County, I looked across green lawns to what looked like attractive middle class homes. “Is this a good neighborhood?” I asked my son. 

“Look around,” he said. “You see that guy in the wifebeater shirt riding a bike?” Yeah. “What’s he doing? Where’s his car? You don’t think his car is in the shop, do you? Adult man, riding a one speed bike at 3 p.m. down a residential street?” My son shook his head. Get with it, Mom. “And that guy, on the other side of the street, walking, carrying a half-finished bottle of malt liquor?”

Okay. This may have been too close to the northeast side of town.

Research on the internet suggests that Beaumont has about twice the crime rate of the average of the rest of the country, but that crime is concentrated on the north and south end areas. These are the places you do not want to go at night. Driving through past Christus St Elizabeth hospital in downtown on Sunday morning, I saw a skinny man sitting disconsolately at the street corner, and on the way back he’d moved to the opposite street corner, and he had something in a bag, but nothing particularly ominous was going on at 10:00 a.m. 

The same morning, at the Cathedral of Saint Anthony on Jefferson street and definitely in a seedy south Beaumont neighborhood, I attended a church service. The ornate basilican church was packed. Particularly notable were the central pews filled with dozens of members of the youth group, just back from a weekend retreat and all wearing t-shirts with “Romans 8:11” emblazoned on the backs.  I looked it up. “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.”

Why the High Crime Rate?

Some reasons: a large number of heavy industry jobs with their stresses, injuries, and recreations. We’re close to the international border, and drug trade proliferates, and there’s a lot of nightlife and liquor. Next, a lack of zoning and controls over housing, housing shortages and also various types of low priced housing. And also, a homeless population drawn by, perhaps, the warm weather, transport via freight trains, and history.

It’s said that you must stay out of all coin operated car washes on the south and north ends of town in particular if the car washes are not operational. Word to the wise.

What is Beaumont Known For?

Perhaps what Beaumont is known for at this point is being near to refineries such as the biggest one in North America, Motiva, which is actually in Port Arthur, but it’s all one big area full of oil refineries along the Neches. It’s an oil town, a refinery town, an industrial mecca.

What Makes a Weekend in Beaumont Special? 

You know there’s some mystery when you have so much industry come up against so much biological energy, water and warmth. This is a semi tropical region and the place seethes with life, trees and stalky grass growing everywhere, puddles with algae, birds overhead, fish in the marshes. Even with the silver pipes of the refineries just around the corner. There’s water, everywhere, water which symbolizes life, which draws men fishing for crabs by the roadside, which grows the cattails beside the road. And then there’s that strange brooding feeling you get anywhere along the Gulf, the idea that nature is omnipresent, even all-penetrating. It made me think about time, about limits. It was a very different type of journey, a different type of thing to learn, than the things I learned on the California trip two years ago.

As a double rainbow rose over the city on Saturday afternoon, illuminating a row of trailers beside the highway, I felt a deep irony: wealth and poverty, abundance and hardship, beauty and loss, alligators and home cookin’ – this was a world of contrasts.  I have to say when a Texas friend saw me on Tuesday after the trip and said “So how was your weekend in Beaumont,” with a twisted inflection and a rolled eye, I said, “It was pretty cool, actually.” And it was.