Sitting atop two-hundred-foot-high sandstone cliffs overlooking a string of verdant isles on the Rio Grande, Roma is a National Historic Landmark District. Similar to San Ygnacio, it had its beginning as a ranching outpost adjacent to a low water crossing...
The Rio Grande lured Henry Clay Davis, a soldier of fortune from Kentucky, after his arrival in Texas in 1839. Upon his marriage to Hilaria de la Garza in 1846, an heiress from the south bank city of Camargo whose family held title to the north...
The city is named after the nearby La Lomita mission ( SM39) founded by the Oblate Order. The religious order sold seventeen thousand acres of its ranchlands in 1908 to midwesterners John T. Conway and...
The largest city in Hidalgo County, McAllen positioned itself from its founding in 1904 as the center of trade in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Within a few years of incorporation McAllen transformed itself into the City of Palms. This tropical image was...
Pharr was created in 1909 by a land development enterprise tied to the Louisiana–Rio Grande Canal Company, the entity that supplied irrigated water from its river pumphouse in the city of Hidalgo ( HL5). Although...
Located on axis with Pharr, eight miles to its north, Edinburg was the creation of irrigation magnate John Closner, who brought a railroad spur to the new city and, at the expense of Hidalgo, made it the county seat in 1908 to promote his land development...
A latecomer by border standards, Weslaco, platted in 1919, literally reflects real estate development in the Valley. Its acronym town name was derived from the W. E. Stewart Land Company. The platted lots, presented for sale at an all-day auction in December 1919...
Mercedes was the first town reached by the railroad in 1904, as it headed west from Harlingen. Created by the American Rio Grande Valley Land and Irrigation Company, Mercedes is bisected east and west by an irrigation canal. To ensure the value of its investment...
Founded in 1904 on the north bank of the Arroyo Colorado, Harlingen's transportation connections made it the gatekeeper of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Located precisely at the point where rail lines and later major highways turn north to Corpus Christi,...
San Benito was the brainchild of Colonel Sam Robertson, railroad engineer turned Valley entrepreneur. The town was platted in 1907 at the juncture of the incoming rail line and the Resaca de los Fresnos, which follows an ancient course of the Rio Grande and...
Founded in 1904 by Edward Burleson Raymond through a town development corporation in partnership with the King family, Raymondville did not truly flourish until it became county seat in 1921. Divided into quadrants, the urban fabric of Raymondville is not as...
Originally settled in the late eighteenth century as Rancho La Habitación, opposite the south bank Mexican city of Reynosa, the settlement was renamed Edinburg by Scottish-born John Young in 1852. Platted with a grid that included a traditional...
Brownsville, the oldest city in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, was created strictly for business by Charles Stillman, an American entrepreneur who made his fortune in Mexico. Seeking to transfer the commercial dominance of Matamoros to the north...
Port Isabel, historically known as Point Isabel, sits on the shores of the Laguna Madre, an ecologically sensitive body of water shielded from the Gulf of Mexico by Padre Island, a long, thin, sand barrier island extending 130 miles north to Corpus Christi....
On the eastern side of the Laguna Madre, directly opposite Port Isabel, the city of South Padre Island, at the southern tip of the barrier island, is located in the vicinity of the Rancho de Santa Cruz de Buena Vista, the original early-nineteenth-...
The coast of Texas curves to frame the northwest corner of the Gulf of Mexico. Much of this coast is lined with barrier islands, separated from the mainland by shallow bays and tidal marshes. The coastal plain slopes gently upward from these bays at an extremely shallow degree of...
Houston, county seat of Harris County, was founded in 1836 by brothers, A. C. Allen and J. K. Allen, who had come to Mexican Texas from New York City in 1832. They located their townsite at the head of navigation on Buffalo Bayou, a small river that empties into...
Downtown Houston is contained within the loop made by I-45, I-10, and U.S. 59 as they crisscross north and south of Buffalo Bayou. The Allen brothers' townsite of 1836 lies within this 1,173-acre precinct, as do its nineteenth-century extensions. Despite the dramatic...
From the 1840s to the early 1900s the South Side Buffalo Bayou, as it is described in property title documents, was formed by a grid of streets and blocks that advanced southward along the axis of Main Street. Between 1870 and the 1910s, the area known as the South...
From downtown Houston, Allen Parkway traverses Sam Houston Park to follow Buffalo Bayou upstream for two miles through a riparian park corridor before reaching the gate piers that mark the entrance to River Oaks, Houston's most elite garden suburban community....
Suburbanization began in the Post Oak area, south of Buffalo Bayou and five miles west of downtown, on the eve of World War II. The small “country place” subdivisions of the interwar years were followed in the postwar period by such large, comprehensively planned subdivisions...
The East End of Houston became in the twentieth century the portion of the city where manufacturing, especially the production of specialized technology for the oil industry, was centered because of proximity to railroad lines, the Houston Ship Channel, and the oil...
North of Buffalo Bayou lies Fifth Ward, historically an ethnically and racially mixed working-class counterpart to the East End. West of downtown and north of Buffalo Bayou is Sixth Ward along the axis of Washington Avenue, which connects downtown to West End,...
Tomball in northwestern Harris County was platted in 1907 at a stop on the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway, built in two phases between 1902 and 1907 to link Galveston and Houston with Dallas and Fort Worth. The town was named for former U.S....
Spring in north central Harris County is an unincorporated extension of Houston's metropolitan sprawl. Anchoring the territory east of I-45, Spring (now called Old Town Spring), a townsite platted in the early twentieth century, was...
The Woodlands is the largest community in Montgomery County. With River Oaks in Houston and Lake Jackson in Brazoria County it ranks as one of the three most historically significant ventures in twentieth-century garden suburban planning...
Conroe, county seat of Montgomery County, is a small town that has been engulfed by metropolitan Houston. Conroe began as a stop on the International and Great Northern Railway where Houston lumberman Isaac Conroe located a sawmill in the mid-1880s. Although...
Montgomery was founded in 1837 on a ridge between Town Creek to the north and Stewart Creek to the south, a mile south of the place where Indian trader Andrew Montgomery had opened a general store in 1823. Montgomery's store lay near the crossing of the...
Orange, county seat of Orange County, lies on a bend of the Sabine River across from Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. It marks the eastern tip of the Golden Triangle of southeast Texas. Evidence of Orange's location near Gulf coastal marshes is omnipresent...
Port Arthur, at the southern tip of the Golden Triangle, was founded in 1896 on the west shore of Sabine Lake by Kansas City promoter Arthur E. Stilwell as the southern terminus of his Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railway (subsequently the Kansas City...
