Fulton was founded by George W. Fulton in 1867 on the east shore of Live Oak Peninsula facing Aransas Bay. Fulton is a resort community. Texas highway 35 runs in a north–south line through Fulton on 8th Street, concealing from motorists the extraordinary experience of Fulton Beach Road. This narrow lane follows the coastline of the bay, just above the water's edge, from Live Oak Point at the northeast tip of the peninsula until it merges with Broadway in Rockport on the south, just past Little Bay and Key Allegro on Frandolig Island. To one side are the water, docks, and one small stretch of commercial development; to the other a steep slope thickly wooded in places with the extraordinary live oak trees from which this landform takes its name, their canopies blown into asymmetrical shapes by the persistent breezes that cross St. Joseph's Island from the Gulf of Mexico. Perched along the slope are a long line of houses and small-scale apartments and motels, few of which are distinguished but that work collectively with the landscape to create a sense of place that is unpretentious and inviting. At points, blankets of vines carpet undergrowth in a spectacularly surreal fashion. With Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi ( CC29), Fulton Beach Road is the one urbanized stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast that can be called beautiful without fear of invidious comparison. Its small scale, relaxed pace, and minimal (so far) rapacious real estate development and aggressive infrastructure impositions suggest the happy medium between building and nature that is painfully absent elsewhere along Texas's long coastline.
Writing Credits
If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.
SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.