The city of Houston, Texas, was a large population centre in the Pre-H United States. The largest city in Texas, Houston in the early 21st Century sprawled across 600 square miles and had a population of over 2 million, with another 3 million living in the surrounding suburbs and urban areas. It's economy was based on the state's lucrative oil industry. Like all Pre-H cities in North America, possibly the world, it was destroyed on 17 November 2015, during the War of a Thousand Suns.
George Washington Jefferson 1st was born in Houston in 1969 and had made an immense fortune through lucky investments and business decisions by the time he was 30. Moving into politics, he founded the Confederate Revivalist Movement, apparently an attempt to distance Texas and maybe the other southern states from the policies of Washington, D.C.. When this failed to gain much support, he switched gears and established the Freedom Foundation, which seemed to be aimed at preserving all of human knowledge within an immense computer mainframe known as COLUMBUS. To this end, the computer was placed within an immense and elaborate fortified bunker called COLUMBUS Centre, located several thousand feet below the city of Houston. Jefferson and a large contingent of associates, known in history as the Four Hundred (although there was actually over 500 of them), were in the bunker when the nuclear exchange took place, and survived the conflict.
Over many years, COLUMBUS Centre was expanded and became the core of Houston/GC, the first divisional base and capital of the Amtrak Federation. The First Family enclave of Cloudlands is located directly above the base, and may be located within the former city limits of Houston.