The first serious effort to examine building a deep water seaport in this part of South Texas began in 1854 with a survey by United States Army engineers. At that time, the area's only natural harbor was at Brazos de Santiago Pass near Point Isabel, where shipping had existed since the 16th century, but shifting sandbars kept large vessels from anchoring there. In 1906, Louis Cabolini, a commercial fisherman in Point Isabel, championed the cause of a deep water port and gathered data that persuaded U.S. Army engineers the project was practical and worthy of federal economic support. Over the next 20 years, several attempts to dredge channels and remove the sandbars achieved little success. In 1929, Brownsville citizens created a navigation district to support federal construction of a deep water port, and between 1934 and 1936 a ship channel linking Brownsville with the Gulf of Mexico was dredged. The port facilities were formally dedicated in May 1936.