San Jose Island, Texas: 130 Years of Private Ownership, From FDR's Cattle Chute to the Bass Family Today

Eight miles east of Rockport, visible from the waterfront on a clear day, sits a 33,000-acre island you cannot visit. Public access ends at the tide line — and has for nearly 130 years. In 1896, it was home to the Tarpon Club, an elite private fishing colony where Ned Green — son of Hetty Green, the most notorious miser in American history — showed up around 1900 with one of the first motorized powerboats on the Texas coast and paid a local man to travel to Chicago just to learn how to run its engine. In 1936, wildcatter Sid Richardson, who once drilled 80 straight wells without a single dry hole, bought the island and built the only home he ever owned. On May 7, 1937, FDR visited the day before his famous Port Aransas tarpon catch — and found no way into the lodge except a cattle chute. Richardson rolled the President of the United States down it. Two weeks later, FDR invited him to the White House to talk oil; Texas went on to supply roughly 6 of the 7 billion barrels the Allies burned in WWII. Eisenhower relaxed there in 1949. A young Senator Lyndon Johnson visited too. Richardson died on the island in 1959, and it passed to the family that still owns it today — undeveloped, private, visible from town, off-limits at the tide line.

Published August 30, 2026