Jamaica Beach, TX

At the 2020 census, Jamaica Beach was a Galveston County city of 1,078 people on Galveston Island, with the Gulf of Mexico to the south and West Bay to the north. Before the subdivision, the site was a burial ground of the Karankawa people. In 1956 Johnny Goyen and Earl Galceran's Jamaica Corporation laid out a 2,000-lot resort near a marina on 320 acres purchased from the Moody family. Beachfront lots initially sold for $3,500, and the early pitch was a second home by the water, not a traditional Texas town.

The development stumbled in the early 1970s when the founding corporation went bankrupt, but homeowners kept the place moving and incorporated Jamaica Beach as a general-law city on May 12, 1975. Limestone roads became hard-surfaced streets, individual septic tanks gave way to a sanitary sewer system, and a volunteer fire department became one of the city's practical institutions. City Hall now holds a collection that grew from materials donated at the 2008 fiftieth-anniversary celebration. Nearby Galveston Island State Park, opened in 1975, protects beach, prairie, and bay habitats that Hurricane Ike reshaped in 2008. Jamaica Beach is a resort plan that learned how to become a year-round city.