Asadores Ranch
Donna, Hidalgo County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Salvador Cavazos Gallegos and his wife, Maria San Juana Anzaldua, founded Asadores Ranch in 1881 on the Mexican La Blanca land grant to Lino Cavazos. The Cavazos family raised cattle and horses and grew corn, beans and other crops along the Rio Grande. Cavazos family members and ranch workers formed a small but important community. The land remained in the Cavazos family until 1902 when it was sold to John Closner. The family retained a one acre burial site where Salvador Cavazos Gallegos and Maria San Juana Anzaldua were buried in 1886 and 1887. The cemetery continued to be used by the family into the 1940s. Asadores Ranch is an example of the many eighteenth and nineteenth century Hidalgo County ranch settlements.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Salvador Cavazos Gallegos and Maria San Juana Anzaldua founded Asadores Ranch in 1881 on land from the Mexican La Blanca grant to Lino Cavazos, raising cattle and horses and farming corn and beans along the Rio Grande. The family and its ranch workers formed a small but tight-knit community, and though the land was sold in 1902, they kept a one-acre burial ground used into the 1940s. The ranch typifies the many Hidalgo County settlements rooted in Spanish and Mexican land grants.
Why it matters
It preserves the Tejano ranching heritage of the Rio Grande borderlands, where Mexican land grants shaped South Texas long before and after it became part of the United States.
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Related people
- · Salvador Cavazos Gallegos
- · Maria San Juana Anzaldua
- · Lino Cavazos
- · John Closner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Handy Ranch
Donna, TX
Thomas J. Handy came to the lower Rio Grande as a Union cavalryman during the Civil War and stayed to build a life on the border. In 1866 he married Angelita Cavazos at her family's ranch along the old military highway, and together the couple became substantial landowners, joining an Anglo newcomer's fortunes to a rooted Tejano ranching family. Handy farmed, ranched, and served as a U.S. Customs inspector, and the family's holdings shaped the land around present-day Alamo for nearly a century.
Run
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Once part of the Cavazos family's mid-1800s Asadores Ranch, this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley was transformed at the turn of the 20th century when East Texas rice farmers and other newcomers organized irrigation companies and coaxed the railroad into the area. The tiny community of Run took its name from postmaster Ed Ruthven, whose store, a school, and his brother's irrigation pumps briefly anchored local life. A devastating flood in 1909 sent many residents drifting toward nearby Donna, and Run faded soon after.
Balli Cemetery
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This small graveyard is the last trace of a 7,000-acre cattle empire rooted in an 18th-century Spanish land grant to Juan José Hinojosa, confirmed posthumously in 1790. His great-grandson Antonio Balli Cavazos settled the land in 1839, named his Balli San Antonio del Esterito Ranch, and established the family cemetery, where burials continued into the 1950s. For roughly 120 years the ranch dominated this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley before fading away.
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