History of Armand Bayou Watershed
(or, The Armand Bayou Bio)

John S Jacob, Texas Coastal Watershed Program

Copyright 1996 by Cliff Meinhardt

Armand Bayou is a stream with a history. Just before his death, Armand Yramategui, a Basque immigrant who used his self-made fortune to promote conservation in the Houston area, pioneered the purchase of what would become the 2400-acre Armand Bayou Nature Center, an ecological jewel in a watershed with some of the most extensive urban sprawl and industry in the country.  The renaming of Middle Bayou for Armand, as he was universally known, is a fitting tribute to the struggle to maintain watershed integrity in the midst of burgeoning development.

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Geological History

A featureless plain is how much of the Texas Gulf Coast is described.  But the knowledgeable eye can pick out the scars of more than 30,000 years of geological activity that have shaped this surface.  The mighty Brazos River once flowed on a vast plain that included the Armand Bayou watershed when sea level was 100 feet lower and the shore line several hundred miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.  Intricate networks of channel scars and oxbows dotted the landscape.  Wind action over the years further shaped these features into potholes and punctuated the landscape with 'pimple mounds', leaving a geological legacy of unequaled ecological complexity, with hydroperiods ranging from perennially wet to nearly semi-arid within a very short distance.  Little of this complexity remains today.

When the glaciers far to the north were at their maximum 18,000 years ago, the Brazos and other rivers cut deep valleys that were drowned to form estuaries when sea level again began to rise.  Armand Bayou empties into Clear Lake and then Galveston Bay, estuaries formed from the drowned valleys of Clear Creek and the Trinity River. The Brazos River now flows some 50 miles to the west of the much smaller Armand Bayou, and has no effect on the Bayou today.

Early Human InhabitantsPaleo Indians and later Karankawas, Attakapas, and Cohuilletans were the first human inhabitants of the Armand Bayou watershed. Shelf middens, or large refuse piles, of oyster shells and other household garbage are the principal archaeological remains of these peoples.  The Indian peoples did have a very profound influence on the landscape as they maintained a lush landscape of tall prairie grasses with fire, providing rich hydrologic and wildlife benefits.  What little remains of that landscape today has been severely degraded by brush encroachment because little attention is paid to prairie management by the current inhabitants.  Armand's preserve at the mouth of the Bayou is today a living memory of that prairie.  The late 1800's saw the beginning of European settlement in the area.  The alluvial soils in this watershed are very fertile, but because the land is so very flat, cultivation is not possible without artificial drainage, which was the first hydrologic impact of the new settlers.  As settlement changed from farmers and ranchers to urban and industrial patterns, the degree of artificial drainage also changed.  When the first settlers arrived, wetlands dominated the landscape and there were very few tributaries to Armand Bayou. Today most of the watershed is effectively drained.  Many of the tributaries are in fact larger than the main Armand Bayou stem, and maintaining what remains of the ecological integrity of this stream without channelizing it is a real challenge.

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Groundwater and Subsidence

Surface drainage, unfortunately, was not the only hydrologic impact of modern development. Most of the water for residences and industry was pumped from the ground, from the sediments laid down as great alluvial and deltaic plains.  Groundwater removal hastened the consolidation of these sediments and the surface subsided by as much as 8-1 0 feet in the watershed.  Groundwater pumpage has stopped, but most of the effects were irreversible.  The subsidence hastened the geological process of rising sea levels.  Forty years ago, Armand Bayou terminated in an extensive salt marsh teeming with wildlife; the Bayou itself was just a small ribbon running through the marsh.  Today that marsh is Mud Lake, an important water body but not nearly as rich as the marsh it replaced.  Without a doubt, Mud Lake--or Lake Pasadena, as it's also known--would have formed eventually, but the process would have taken hundreds if not thousands of years, leaving time for ecological adjustment.

The 61 square mile Armand Bayou watershed has evolved from a pristine alluvial plain dotted with perennial and seasonal wetlands, fringed by salt marshes at its mouth, to a dominantly urban and suburban residential and urban complex.  The watershed is home to some of the densest complexes of petrochemical industries in the nation.  And yet in spite of this development, Armand Bayou retains much of its original character as a coastal bayou, albeit reduced to a central riparian core and a few pockets of the wetland complexes deeded by the ancestral Brazos River.

Today The people of the Armand Bayou watershed now have to ask themselves if the fragments left from the historical bayou are worth saving.  There are, no doubt, recreational benefits to be had from canoeing, hiking, or rowing on the bayou.  The bayou is an important wildlife corridor, and the remaining wetlands act as important hydrologic buffers.  A few stirrings towards the restoration of watershed integrity are beginning to take place.  School children have a chance to see what the prairie looked like, thanks to the man for whom the Bayou is now named. A Watershed Working Group of public and private agencies is exploring how they can work together to better manage the watershed.  And a legal process, known as the Total Maximum Daily Load, that may help allocate pollutant loads is being experimented with in the watershed. The Armand Bayou watershed has seen vast changes in its 30,000+ years of existence.  Change is inevitable, but the human changes recently imposed have take place at a catastrophic pace.  If unaltered, these changes will lead towards an irreversible degradation if not destruction of the bayou.  The process of watershed recovery must take place at nearly the same rate for it to be successful.

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