Not even Horatio Alger could have imagined George Phydias Mitchell, whose rags-to-riches tale stretches credulity to its outer limits and beyond. Raised during the Depression by poor, uneducated Greek immigrants who struggled daily to feed their four children, Mitchell went on to become one of the wealthiest men in America, a multi-billionaire oil-and-gas tycoon and real estate developer who credits his enormous success to the single most important lesson his father ever taught him: the power of perseverance.

That trait served him well for almost 20 years as he battled his own experts over his insistence there were gas deposits to be found in the Barnett Shale region of north-central Texas. In the end, its vast reserves created about half the value of Mitchell Energy & Development Corp., which he sold in 2002 for $3.1 billion. “We would not be talking about the Barnett Shale if not for George Mitchell,” geologist and Mitchell Energy alumnus Kent Bowker told the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2005. “This field is making billions of dollars for lots of people. They should erect a statue of George Mitchell and pay homage to it every day.”

Before he stood his ground on the Barnett Shale, his legendary stubbornness led to another, better-known triumph. In the 1960s, he began work on The Woodlands, which became one of the most acclaimed “new town” developments in the U.S., located on 25,000 acres 27 miles north of Houston. It took him 11 years and 300 separate transactions to assemble the land. Everyone told him he was insane. In 1997, he sold the company that developed The Woodlands for $543 million. Today, with a population of more than 86,500, the environmentally friendly city is hailed as a visionary precursor to the current standard for ecological sustainability.

But Barnett Shale and The Woodlands, measured strictly in time, pale in comparison to his dogged pursuit of a mission that had haunted him since the 1950s. In the half-century since, it has defined Mitchell, now 88, and his family every bit as much as the gushers of black gold that made him rich. Despite the pressures of running an energy and real estate empire, he never forgot his beloved hometown of Galveston Island, a 32-mile-long barrier island located 50 miles south of Houston, whose historical arc into decline and decay intersected Mitchell’s own surge to wealth and prominence. So, three decades ago, as soon as he had the resources to do it, he launched a crusade to save Galveston’s remaining architectural treasures from the wrecking ball.

After being hailed as one of the world’s great port cities in the late 19th century, a thriving center of commerce in the cotton and sugar trades that begat the most spectacular collection of Victorian architecture outside New England, Galveston fell on hard times. A hurricane known as The Great Storm devastated it in 1900, killing 6,000 of its 37,000 residents. When dredging began 11 years later on the Houston Ship Channel, the onetime “Wall Street of the Southwest” began a long, slow descent into obsolescence.

In the early 1970s, Mitchell began his juggernaut to reverse the course of history. It has continued, unabated, ever since. “George has a love affair with Galveston, pure and simple,” Cynthia Mitchell, his wife of 65 years, told Historic Preservation in 1995. She has been his partner in that love affair every step of the way, contributing an uncanny eye for design to his financial and political abilities.

Like everything else in his remarkable life, his sense of place, his explanation of how Galveston seeped so deeply into his soul, is expressed with simplicity and sincerity. “As a young boy,” he says, “I knew it was a wonderful place. We had great schools. So, I always admired the island as a great place to be raised.”

Hoping for a better life in America, his father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, arrived from Greece at Ellis Island in 1901. After making his way to Arkansas, he did manual labor on a railroad gang. When Savvas went to pick up his pay, the Irish paymaster couldn’t pronounce or spell his name, so he said, “From now on, your name is Mike Mitchell, the same as mine.” The abbreviated, distinctly American moniker stuck.

The new “Mike Mitchell” migrated to Galveston, where he eventually opened a pressing shop and shoeshine parlor at 23rd Street and Avenue Q and started a family with his new bride, Katina Eleftheriou, who had arrived by way of Florida with Greek sponge divers.

The elder Mitchell had traveled across the country to ask for her hand in marriage after seeing her photograph in a newspaper. Upon arrival, he learned that she was engaged to another man. But after a dose of his perseverance, intermingled with his humble charm and a lapel resplendent with fresh carnations, Katina broke off her engagement and returned to Galveston with her new suitor. The couple established their home in a modest apartment above his shop.

After giving birth to four children—three boys and a girl—Katina died of a stroke when George was 13, but not before instilling in him a drive for an education that would set him on his course in life.

“My mother was concerned that we had to have an education,” says Mitchell, who graduated at the top of his class at Texas A&M in 1940, with a degree in petroleum engineering and an emphasis in geology. “That was one of the main reasons she came to this country. It was a very unusual thing at the time for Greek immigrants, but my brothers and my sister and I all graduated from college. We had to work odd jobs and ask for financial help, but we made it through.”

By the 1950s, Mitchell had moved to Houston and launched his career as a wildcatter. Every summer, he and his growing family, which would eventually number 10 children, made pilgrimages to the island he had so loved as a boy. “As time went on, my wife and I began to notice that we were
losing these marvelous, beautiful homes that were being demolished to make room for service stations and convenience markets,” Mitchell says. “That made us sad, to think we were losing all of that wonderful heritage. So we became very interested in restoration, and how to preserve Galveston’s history and beauty. We had lost a lot, but we became determined to save what was left.”

Two decades later, at about the same time The Woodlands made its celebrated debut, Mitchell commenced his long-planned initiative in the downtown Strand district, where buildings that had once been symbols of 19th century glory stood abandoned and boarded up. Over the ensuing years, he and Cynthia would acquire and lovingly restore 17 historic buildings on the Strand and breathe new life into a dying city. Today, his investment totals about $100 million and includes the 119-room The Tremont House hotel, a long gone 1836 landmark he recreated in the 1879 Leon and H. Blum Building, one block south of the Strand, and the 226-room Hotel Galvez, built across the street from the new seawall in 1911 and bought by Mitchell in disrepair in 1993. Both properties are members of Historic Hotels of America. The Galvez is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Concurrent with the 1985 opening of The Tremont House, Mitchell revived the Galveston Mardi Gras, which had been celebrated for 80 years before being discontinued after World War II and vanishing along with much of the city’s heritage. Today, it is one of the top tourist attractions in town, drawing several hundred thousand visitors each year.

To his enduring credit, Mitchell understood from the start that he needed to create a thriving community, not a museum. “That is pretty rare,” says Boone Powell, FAIA, president of Ford, Powell & Carson, the San Antonio architectural firm that has worked with Mitchell since he bought his first building. “George is sophisticated and he understands what it takes to have a livable city. He realizes that theatre and restaurants and cafes and street life and festivals like Mardi Gras are important. He understands that for a city to be successful, it has to have all of those things. So that’s why he has supported so many things.” Adds Mitchell’s 45-year-old son, Grant: “He knew it needed to be a living, breathing place. He knew you couldn’t preserve it like a bug trapped in amber.”

Mitchell also understood that patience would be as important as perseverance. In 1995, Powell explained the Mitchell modus operandi to Historic Preservation: “George invests the way the British did in the 17th and 18th centuries. The developers of Regent’s Park and Berkeley Square used to say they were investing for the third generation because it was so difficult to get a decent return in the short term. George is doing the same thing. He rejects the narrow accountant’s view that everything has to amortize in seven years.”

The other extraordinary trait Powell has observed over the years is Mitchell’s obsessive attention to detail. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking across Galveston and he’ll be coming the other way, and he’ll see me and say, ‘Did you see what’s happening on the second floor over at such-and-such a building? I spoke with a carpenter over there,’” the architect says. “By God, he checks up on projects point by point, often ahead of us. For a guy that’s got $3 billion to pay attention at that level is just unparalleled.”

Former Mayor Jan Coggeshall, who has known Mitchell for more than 30 years, has also witnessed his passion close-up. “He just put his heart and soul into those buildings,” says Coggeshall, who joins Mitchell, a few other local luminaries, and some of Mitchell’s childhood friends each week when Mitchell journeys from Houston for the Sunday Morning Coffee Club at Fishtails Restaurant on the seawall, before venturing over to the Hotel Galvez for Sunday brunch. “The thing about him is that he is really interested in what is going on. He is not a long-distance player who is just putting in money.”

Peter Brink, now senior vice president for programs at the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C., worked alongside Mitchell for 17 years as executive director of the Galveston Historical Foundation. “The most amazing thing about George,” he says, “is that we’d walk the Strand and he would pick up every scrap of trash he saw and put it into a trash barrel. Nothing was too small for him to do. Here was this billionaire using his bare hands to help make the Strand look the way he wanted it to look.”

Grant Mitchell points out that there is no easy answer to what has motivated his father for all these years. “When you talk about the things that drove him in terms of The Woodlands, or urban renewal, or historic preservation, or the environment or sustainability,” he says, “somehow they are all interlinked. But it’s hard to put your finger on what it is about Galveston that drives him so completely. That’s the mystery of George Mitchell, really. It would be easy to say he loves historic buildings, but it’s much more complex than that. Certainly, there was a drive to give back to his community, but that in itself is too simplistic. Somehow, what drives him about Galveston is also what drives him about fundamental physics and his other interests—and I don’t know what that is, even though I’ve been thinking about it all my life.”

To a more objective outsider, it is perhaps not as much of a mystery. In the many gentle threads of a conversation with Mitchell, one aspect of his life is evident above all others—his deep and abiding gratitude for the life that his parents and Galveston bestowed upon him, against all odds. “My father couldn’t read or write Greek or English,” Mitchell says. “But with perseverance, he made his way and got well known around town. He knew all of the top people, the doctors and the lawyers. He didn’t have enough money to pay them, but they would give him free help all the time. He was a well-respected person. So, I have always admired the opportunity we had in Galveston. I’ve always had a great deal of respect for the people I was
surrounded by as a boy.”

He credits his mother with his unbridled and longstanding passion for his hometown. “We had no money,” he says. “But she was well thought of by everyone in the Greek community. Her thoughts about education were very important, but she was also always trying to help the community. So I guess that’s where it all started out.”

That sense of commitment has been passed down to Mitchell’s son Grant, who lives in Venice, California, and daughter, Sheridan Mitchell Lorenz, who lives in Austin, Texas. “He has infected us with his passion for Galveston,” says Grant, who directed a documentary film about the Great Storm of 1900 that plays daily at Mitchell’s Pier 21 complex on Galveston harbor. “We share a reverence to follow through with his commitment, and we have a continuing conversation about how we can do that. We have a lot of respect for what he has done. One of the things that keeps him young is his activity in Galveston. He absolutely loves it.” 

Photo Captions:
Photo 1: George Mitchell poses in front of The Tremont House, a Victorian-era hotel nestled in the heart of Galveston Island’s Strand Historic District.
Photo 2: The Old Washington Hotel Building, built in 1873, was acquired by the Mitchells in 1982 and now houses The Phoenix Bakery and offices. It is an exact replica of the original which was destroyed by fire in 1983 after having withstood the high winds of Hurricane Alicia. The Mitchells restored it at a cost of $4 million in 1987.
Photo 3: Harbor House has been recently updated as a modern day translation of a working waterfront warehouse, photo courtesy of Richard Payne, FAIA.
Photo 4: Hotel Galvez has been welcoming visitors since 1911, when it was known as the “Queen of the Gulf.” Today, it is the crown jewel in George Mitchell’s portfolio of historic Galveston buildings, photo courtesy of Richard Payne, FAIA.
Photo 5: During his transformation of the 1879 Leon and H. Blum Building into a revived, if relocated, Tremont House Hotel, Mitchell fought and won a protracted battle for the right to preserve its famous mandard roof as a critical historical detail, photo courtesy of Richard Payne, FAIA.