Beginnings, South Belt Houston Digital Archives

courtesy of Timothy David Hardcastle

The South Belt area is a small square on the grid that makes up sprawling, metropolitan Houston. Located about fifteen miles south of the center of downown Houston, it had been home primarily to cattle and rice fields until the 1960s.

The map above was printed in 1966 as the early boom of house building was beginning in earnest at the South Belt exit of Interstate 45. 

From modest homes in Genoa, then the Kirkmont neighborhood, and finally the Sagemont subdivision, families flocked to the South Belt area for its proximity to Houston. The Beltway is already marked as "proposed" on the map in 1966, but for decades it remained an illusory promise.

In the meantime, homes were multiplying, roads were connected, and schools were opened, including, in the fall of 1968, the area's high school, named after famed Texas writer, J. Frank Dobie. 

From the vague boundaries of Almeda Mall, opened in 1968 and attached to the previously lone Foley's, down to Scarsdale and over to Blackhawk, this little corner of the world was my childhood home. 

The collective memory of the people who built this neighborhood, many of whom still live in the same homes they bought, brand-new, nearly fifty years ago, is a treasure that waits to be discovered before it is lost to the passage of time.

This little corner of the internet aims to house those memories.

The South Belt Houston Digital Archive will function, at first, as a home to the photographs I've been able to collect from the area, particularly from the J. Frank Dobie yearbooks of the first two decades and the archives of the local paper, started in 1976, as the South Belt Press. I knew it in my day as the South Belt Leader. And in 1987, it expanded its purview yet again as the South Belt-Ellington Leader. 

I hope, eventually, to collect many others' contributions and stories, as well. 

It's a humble beginning, to be sure . . . a little like those cattle and rice fields.