Santa Fe (English: Holy Faith) is a city in Galveston County, Texas, United States.

It is named for the Santa Fe Railroad (now part of BNSF Railway) which runs through the town alongside State Highway 6.

[4] 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 which was named after the railway, was established shortly afterward to serve the area.

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.

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.

[5][6] The controversy and similar conflicts in nearby port towns like Rockport, led to a decision of the United States District Court, S.D.

Texas, Houston Division[7] Vietnamese Fishermen's Association v. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,[8] and also was the basis of the story for the 1985 Ed Harris film Alamo Bay.

Being prone to flash flooding, the area is lined with numerous drainage ditches, culverts, diversionary canals and reservoirs.

In 2019 Skip Hollandworth of Texas Monthly wrote that Santa Fe "still feels very much like a small town" despite that distance.

[21] The Santa Fe Community Library opened inside a former World War II army barracks in 1975.