Wooster was founded by Quincy Adams Wooster and Willard D. Crow, who came from Mapleton, Iowa, with their families late in 1892 and purchased more than 1,000 acres in the Nathaniel Lynch League. A few weeks later Junius Brown, also from Monona County, Iowa, bought adjacent land and moved his family there in 1893. Until the Humble Refinery opened in 1919, most area residents were related to these three families. Although Wooster and Crow platted the town of Wooster on their land in January 1893, the community actually developed in the early 1920s on Brown's land in the James Strange Labor. For a long time Wooster was a pleasant rural community with a business district on Market Street Road, now Bayway Drive, near Wooster Street that included grocery stores, cafes, a service station, churches, schools, a volunteer fire department, and a chamber of commerce. Much of the town's economy was tied to the oil refinery. The Wooster-Crow land was first developed through two new residential subdivisions, Wooster Heights in 1930 and Brownwood in 1937. During WWII, the area hosted a temporary holding camp for German POWs. Baytown's repeated annexation attempts succeeded in 1962. Today the Wooster community is nearly gone, having succumbed to nature and progress: much of Brownwood is submerged because of extensive subsidence and the devastation of hurricanes Carla and Alicia, all remaining homes have been removed, and the area is now the Baytown Nature Center. Between 1999 and 2007, Exxonmobil purchased almost all homes in Wooster and Wooster Terrace to create a greenbelt around the refinery, though the Wooster Heights and Lakewood subdivisions remain intact.