Missing Safe

In the late 1800's, a couple of miles south of present Freeport, Texas, stood the small resort town of Quintana.

In its heyday, Quintana had the finest recreational facilities on the Texas Gulf Coast. Among the prominent features of the town were its plush (for that era), two-story hotels on the beach, and the racetrack on the banks of the Brazos River about a mile away.

Before the days of radar and spotter planes, residents of the Gulf Coast regions had virtually no warning of the eminence, size or intensity of approaching hurricanes. Such was the case of Quinrana, which found itself squarely in the path of a monster storm roaring suddenly out of the Gulf of Mexico in 1875.

There are few things big enough or heavy enough to withstand the winds and tides of a hurricane. After a storm, pieces of buildings and foundations can be found great distances from where they originally stood. This brings us to the essence of our story - the Quintana hotel safe.

After the storm had passed, and some of the more important matters had been taken care of (such as burying the dead), one of the most diligently searched for items was the hotel safe. For almost 100 years now, people have searched for the elusive safe.

A couple of years ago, I talked to a man who was working with his metal detector in a field near the old town site. He told me he had been searching for the safe off and on for over 20 years, and had tried everything from dowsing to hypnotism with no luck.

The safe was said to be about five feet tall and weighed nearly a ton. It is believed to contain a considerable amount of gold coins. It was common practice in those days for the citizens of a town without a bank to use the hotel safe as a vault. Quintana had no bank.

But the safe could be miles from where the old hotel was ripped from its foundations by the storm.