Early locomotive of the Rio Grande Railroad that ran from Point Isabel to Brownsville from 1871 to the early 1920's (photo date unknown)
photograph courtesy of The Institute of Texan Cultures
It was not the steamboats or the sheep-raising industry, but rather the railroads that brought the greatest growth and change to the region. Only a few years after the Civil War, the first railroad reached the river, thanks to the United States Army.
With the arrival of a large Federal Army in the summer of 1865, General Philip H. Sheridan quickly realized the difficulties of landing troops at the mouth of the river, where the depth of the water was less than three feet. At the entrance to Brazos Island the main army supply base the water on the bar averaged from nine to eleven feet. General Sheridan put army engineers to work building a narrow gauge railroad eighteen miles long from the north end of Brazos Island to White's Ranch on the Rio Grande. From there, men and supplies could then go by steamer to Fort Brown. The railroad operated for several years, but the track was eventually dismantled. Today, the roadbed of the army railroad, along with a few bridge pilings, can still be seen near Boca Chica where a historical marker on State Highway 4 commemorates the site.
By the end of the 1870s came Uriah Lott's $7,000 per mile, financially troubled, narrow-gauge Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande Railroad that stretched from Corpus Christi to Laredo. By 1881, it was Laredo that took on the trappings of a boom town. Small villages along the route, such as Peña (Hebbronville) and Aguilares, took on new importance. Goods destined for Mexico were now shipped to Corpus Christi and went by train to Laredo, thus bypassing Brownsville and the riverport towns.
Early locomotive of the Rio Grande Railroad that ran from Point Isabel to Brownsville from
1871 to the early 1920's (photo date unknown)
photograph courtesy of The Institute of Texan Cultures
While Lott's railroad, later known as the Texas-Mexican, was pushing into Laredo from the east, Jay Gould's standard-gauge International and Great Northern was building south from San Antonio. Even before the completion of the line, freight was being shipped to the end of the line and transferred to wagons, which took the goods to Laredo. By December 1, 1881, the I&GN had reached Webb Station, only thirty miles north of Laredo. On December 15, 1881, almost twelve months to the day since the company had launched construction southward, the railroad reached the border. The I& GN not only linked Laredo to San Antonio, but also to the entire midwest and eastern states. It had a much greater impact on the border than did the Texas-Mexican Railroad.
Both Laredo and Nuevo Laredo celebrated the arrival of the railroads with a gigantic fiesta that began on Christmas Eve, 1881 and continued past the new year. Bull fights, cock fights, horse and mule races, and gala balls characterized the celebrations. Bands played, flags waved, citizens cheered, and liquor owed.
Construction of a temporary, low-water bridge began almost immediately. On March 8, 1882, the first passenger train, carrying Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman, military officers from Fort McIntosh and the border's leading businessmen and politicians, steamed across the river to be saluted by the Mexican military. Entrepreneur Jay Gould himself arrived in Laredo seven weeks later to be greeted by town dignitaries.
With completion of the railroad to the border, materials bound for the towns and mines of northern Mexico poured into Laredo. At the same time, the narrow-gauge Mexico Oriental Interoceanic and International, commonly called the Mexican National Railway, was rapidly laying rails south from Nuevo Laredo. With other construction crews working to build north of Mexico City, as many as 16,000 men were said to have been at work on the railroad at one time.
By March 1, 1882, 100 men were laboring twelve hours a day to grade a line upriver from Laredo for the narrow-gauge Rio Grande and Pecos to what became the coal mining camps of Dolores, Minerva, and Darwin. A second parallel standard-gauge line and another narrow-gauge had also been built to the mines by the summer of 1882. Coal barges, which once plied the river, as well as the huge multiteamed wagons that hauled the coal overland, were now remnants of the past.
The ex-governor of Colorado, A. C. Hunt, financed the building of the Rio Grande and Pecos to the coal mines and leased most of the coal deposits. He bragged of a day when his railroad would eventually stretch along the banks of the Rio Grande from Brownsville to El Paso. Ground was broken at Laredo and a silver spike driven on May 24, 1882, to commemorate the laying of the first rail on the Brownsville line. The grandiose railroad was never built, for Hunt overextended his financial resources and declared bankruptcy by 1885.
Dutch-born Uriah Lott, who had secured the financial assistance of Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King in the building of the Texas-Mexican Railroad to Laredo, was also hoping to give the Lower Valley the same access to the "outside world." A railroad to the Lower Valley would also give Corpus Christi another rail outlet. In 1889, consequently, Lott received a charter to build the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway. A.M. French, chief engineer on the project, ran several different lines to the river, but eventually agreed on a road that would join the Texas-Mexican Railroad some fifteen miles west of Corpus Christi at what is today Robstown. After sod was broken on the line on July 26, 1903, sweaty laborers set out hacking a right-of-way through the brush south toward the Lower Valley.
As grading camps came to dot the area south of the Nueces, the $12,500 per mile St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway, with a depot every ten miles, reached present-day Harlingen, San Benito, and eventually Brownsville. By the summer of 1904, construction of a branch line called the Hidalgo or Sam Fordyce (named for the chairman of the railroad's Executive Board) was underway up the Valley, through what is today Mercedes, Weslaco, Donna, Alamo, San Juan, Pharr, McAllen and Mission.
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