check out history - Santa Fe, TX. | WikiXM

In 1877, the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway was built through the western part of Galveston county. By the turn of the century, three small, unincorporated towns had formed along the railway: Alta Loma, Arcadia and Algoa. The Santa Fe Independent School District, named after the railway, was established shortly afterward to serve the area. In the mid-1970s, the neighboring city of Hitchcock attempted to annex an area in eastern Alta Loma known as the Morningview neighborhood.

Amid intense opposition to becoming part of Hitchcock, residents began a petitioning effort to incorporate the area into a new city. On January 21, 1978, a ballot proposal to incorporate Alta Loma and parts of Arcadia passed by a wide margin and the city of Santa Fe was born. Santa Fe has since grown to include all of Arcadia and parts of Algoa, and, ironically, is now twice the size of Hitchcock. On February 14, 1981, the Ku Klux Klan hosted a fish fry on a private farm in Santa Fe to protest the growing presence of Vietnamese shrimpers in the Gulf.

During the event, a Vietnamese fishing boat was ceremonially burned. That controversy, as well as similar conflicts in nearby port towns like Rockport, led to a decision of the United States District Court, S.D. Texas, Houston Division Vietnamese Fishermen's Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and also served as the basis for the 1985 Ed Harris film Alamo Bay. On June 19, 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Santa Fe Independent School District's policy of permitting "student-led, student-initiated" prayer at football games and other school events violated the Constitution's prohibitions against the establishment of state religion.On the morning of May 18, 2018, a school shooting occurred at Santa Fe High School when 17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis opened fire in an art classroom, killing ten students including Sabika Sheikh, 17 (an exchange student from Pakistan) and faculty and injuring thirteen others.

Students and faculty evacuated the building when a fire alarm was activated. Pagourtzis surrendered after being injured in an exchange of gunfire with school officers. Originally scheduled to stand trial in January 2020 for ten counts of capital murder, Pagourtzis has been in custody at a state mental hospital since being found unfit to stand trial in November 2019.