Image: Armand Bayou

Description: Armand Bayou, also known as Middle Bayou, rises in twenty miles south of Houston in southeastern Harris County and runs ten miles southeast along the eastern edge of the Clear Lake oilfield to its mouth on Mud Lake. The creek flows through urban Pasadena into a flat grassy prairie surfaced by clay and sandy loams that support wild hickory, holly, oak, elm, and ash. The area was the site of an early Cajun settlement. The 1,600-acre Armand Bayou nature preserve surrounding the bayou protects the interlocking ecologies of prairie, marsh, and forest, the indigenous habitat of the area. . When the first settlers arrived on the watershed they found herds of wild cattle and horses, and until the late 1890s cattle comprised the majority of the animals in the riparian and prairie areas of the Armand Bayou watershed. William Vince received title to a league of land (4,428 acres) on the south side of Buffalo Bayou as one of Stephen F. Austin’s first 300 settlers. The cattle on the land were primarily wild cattle, descendants of the Spanish cattle and domesticated cattle that strayed from settlers. Armond Bayou Nature Center is the largest urban wilderness preserve in the United States.
Title: Armand Bayou
Credit: Own work
Author: Jim Evans
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes