Sorenson-Stair Building & The High Price of Killing Texas Mosquitoes

In 1886, a Danish sailor named Simon Sorenson was put ashore in Rockport with malaria and left there. He never left. He built a mercantile that still stands at 406 S. Austin Street. This episode follows the fever that stranded him — and traces malaria from a ship dock on Aransas Bay to John Muir collapsing in a Florida swamp, to the federal program that killed it with DDT, to the brown pelicans and bald eagles that nearly disappeared from this coast as a result. The mosquito trucks still run at dawn. The whooping cranes are still in the same water.

Published July 23, 2026