November 10, 1914, thousands gathered at the Port of Houston as a band played "The Star Spangled Banner" from a barge in the center of the turning basin. In the hush that followed, the mayor's daughter sprinkled white roses into the water from the top deck of a U.S. Revenue Cutter Service vessel. "I christen thee Port of Houston," she said. Cannon fire-triggered 1200 miles away by President Woodrow Wilson at the White House-officially opened the new Houston Ship Channel for operation.

This year almost 7,000 vessels will call at the Port of Houston, which rose from relative obscurity to rank today as first in the U.S. in foreign waterborne tonnage.

Houston's impact on the shipping industry began before the ship channel even opened. Innovation came in the form of its financing: half national, half local. Prior to the "Houston Plan"-the first federal match program-local interests had never contributed substantially to a Congressional construction project. Since then, no project has been adopted by the national government without local contributions.

The port next led the nation as the American economic engine shifted from eastern coal mines to Texan petroleum power. By 1930, the ship channel boasted nine oil refineries. Demand for petroleum and its byproducts increased after World War II, and synthetic rubber plants joined the refineries. At the conclusion of the conflict, the once-provincial port-not even the largest in its state two decades earlier-carried more tonnage than all but two other American cities.

In April 1956, the world's first containership, the Ideal X, unloaded at Houston its inaugural consignment of 58 35-foot containers. Within the year, the channel hosted regular, full-celled containership service that would become the industry standard by the mid-1960s.

Along with rising revenues, however, increased traffic brought growing pollution that made the port a particular target of environmental criticism into the early 1990s. Administrators responded with a decade-long effort to transform from conservation laggard to leader. By 2002, innovative projects to reduce and recycle solid waste, lower air emissions, and improve water quality made the port the first in the country to meet ISO 14001 standards for excellence in its environmental management system. Since 2000, says port chairman Jim Edmonds, "our environmental staff, along with the EPA, have helped write the curriculum that helps other ports understand that concept and get those designations."

Today, Houston takes the vanguard of a thorny new category of American port management: anti-terrorist protection. "Along the fifty-mile Houston Ship Channel, there are more explosive materials, toxic gases, and deadly petrochemicals than anywhere else in the country," observes the November 2004 Texas Monthly. "Most security experts agree that it's one of America's top targets." Chairman Edmonds concurs, estimating that about half of the nation's daily gasoline and petrochemical supply derives directly from private industry sited on the ship channel. Last March, the FBI announced a high terrorist alert specifically for the area.

Houston has answered the threat with a port-wide security plan surpassing any federal mandate. At its core is a security command center that increases communication among the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs, FBI and INS, and operators of the port's 151 privately-owned facilities. New stationary radiation detection gates scan every outgoing container for bombs or explosive devices while gamma-ray machines probe about one in eight incoming loads.

"We've been very aggressive and we'll continue to be very aggressive," Edmonds describes seven decades of Texan experimentation. "We are guinea pigs here."