Memories of Bailey's Fish Camp all that's left on the Orange County Road by MARGARET TOAL Published Saturday, January 3, 2009
in Beaumont Enterprise:
Five brown pelicans sat on a weathered log in the blue water of the Sabine Lake marsh on a clear, crisp December day. On the other side of the road, teal and Canada geese floated on the gentle waves rocked by the breeze.
A broken wooden console piano sat upright along one side of the road. A little ways down, a twisted boy's black bike was on the opposite side. The items had washed out of houses on the storm surge of Hurricane Ike, which inundated the marsh and adjacent Bridge City.
Ike also swept away the buildings belonging to the Bailey family, generations of whom had lived in the marsh for more than 80 years. Only pilings rise from the water, showing where piers or docks once stood.
Rob Bailey's Fish Camp, which used to be at the end of the road, is gone. The two-story house built by Bailey descendents to replace the original store and dance hall that burned in 1997 is gone.

Stories of the family will never be gone, though. And in Bridge City, the name will never die. The shell road that runs through the marsh and along the shores of Sabine Lake is known as "Bailey Road," although its map name often reads Lake Road. Most of the marsh now is part of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Lower Neches Wildlife Management Area, though Bailey descendents still own some of the land. The road also is part of the Gulf Coast Birding Trail, usually named by the Audubon Society as one of the best bird-watching trails in the country.
The birds won't be as easy to watch now, though, because the state's nature observation point has been washed away.
Sue Bailey, 84, who was married for nearly 50 years to Rob Bailey, died in April of cancer. She was a well-known, self-taught naturalist and photographer who learned the birds, fish and flora of the marsh through years of observation. In 1975, she became the Audubon Society's first woman marshal, watching over nesting grounds of roseate spoonbills, great white egrets and blue herons.
Through the years, she had been featured on "The Today Show," "Texas Country Reporter," and in numerous newspaper articles and Southern Living magazine.
Her niece, Betty Vail, 52, of Bridge City said she hasn't been to Bailey Road since the storm.
"I just can't take it," she said about the loss. Vail and her husband are rebuilding their flooded house.
A cousin told her that the top part of the yellow shrimp boat the family called "the old Owl" -because its license letters included o-w-l - was found stuck at the top of a telephone pole after Ike.

Through the years, The Enterprise has written many stories on the Baileys and the marsh, recording a family history that reaches back into the 1920s. Henry and Mary Bailey built a seafood restaurant, store and gas station on the road and opened on July 4, 1926, archived stories said. The site was perfect. The Dryden Ferry was the only way to get across the Neches River to Port Arthur before the Rainbow Bridge opened in 1938. The store was by the ferry landing. Henry and Mary had 10 children, including Rob, who would have been 15 in 1926, and Fred, who would have been 6. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the Baileys got a license to sell beer and turned the second story of the restaurant-store into a dance hall, Enterprise stories report. Performers at the dance hall included Moon Mullican, Cliff Bruner and Harry Choate. Henry Bailey died in 1943, but Fred Bailey, who never married or had children, and his mother continued to operate the dance hall until 1954. Fred Bailey told reporters he closed the dance hall after a man killed his cousin in an argument about a woman. Sue Young was a descendent of the Harvey family, which settled in the Prairie View area, the original name of Bridge City, in the 1800s. She married Rob Bailey in 1941 and moved to the shores of Sabine Lake. She and her husband ran a bait shop and boat launch and small store, mainly selling cheese crackers and soft drinks. They didn't sell beer. About a mile away, Fred Bailey had a small bar at the old restaurant-store. He sold beer but no bait, so the brothers didn't compete, Enterprise stories report. Fred had a fishing-crabbing pier across the road from his building with a sign reading "Private property for my friends only." Not so exclusive as it sounded, however, since everyone he met was a friend. Vail, whose mother was Sue's sister, said she grew up as a Bailey. "Before I even went to school, I could spell bait," she said. She would work for her aunt and uncle writing "b-a-i-t" in crayon on boxes of freshly caught shrimp, sold to catch the big redfish and speckled trout in Sabine Lake. "We used to get so sick of eating fish, shrimp and crabs," she said. One of her girlhood jobs was to run up to boats coming in from fishing and ask what they had caught. She'd give the catch report to Sue, who would telephone fishing reports to local newspapers. Besides helping at the bait store, she fished, crabbed, threw casting nets for shrimp and mullet, and watched the birds. The kids could get a soda from the store after 10 a.m. "We could go swimming in the evening," she said.
Her two sons, now 34 and 27, had their first jobs at the bait shop. Vail, when she grew up, would drive the shrimp boat to catch fresh bait for her aunt. Sue and Rob lost two houses to storms, a small house in 1941 and their "dream" house. The second one was moved from Orange in 1955, with half coming by land and half by barge, Enterprise archives said. Hurricane Carla in 1961 ripped it up, leaving parts of it on Texas 87 in Bridge City. The original restaurant-store survived the storms, but was vacant when it burned in 1997. Fred didn't live to see that, having died in 1994. A granddaughter of Sue and Rob had planned on remodeling the old building as a house. She and her husband then built a new building to live in that resembled the original building. That was the building destroyed by Ike, wiping out the Bailey presence on Bailey Road