Casterline Fish Company
Fulton, Aransas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Founded by Cecil Weber Casterline in the 1930s, his “fish house” initially sourced fish, oysters and shrimp from local fisherman, iced the catch in barrels and shipped them by rail to San Antonio and other destinations. In 1944, Cecil and his father, Frank, purchased the harbor property and acquired several fishing vessels from other fishermen. Cecil’s brother, Leslie Eugene, joined the business after WWII. During the 1950s, the family mostly processed shrimp and oysters. Early boats were purchased, but the family later built their own boats around 40 to 80 feet long and most were named for family members. In 2015, Casterline Fish Company was sold to Prestige Oysters. However, Casterline Fish Company’s legacy and influence on Fulton’s seafood industry remains.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
During the 1930s Cecil Weber Casterline opened a Fulton "fish house" on the Gulf, buying oysters, shrimp, and fish from local boats, packing the catch in barrel ice, and shipping it inland by rail to San Antonio and beyond. With his father Frank he bought the harbor property in 1944, and the family, later joined by brother Leslie after World War II, built their own fleet of boats named for relatives. For some eighty years Casterline Fish Company was a mainstay of the Coastal Bend seafood trade before its 2015 sale to Prestige Oysters.
Why it matters
The company is a window into the working Gulf Coast economy, where family fishing houses turned a local catch into a regional industry that fed inland cities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Texas coast at Fulton has always faced the water, and for generations the rhythm of life here was set by what the Gulf gave up each day. By the 1930s, the Coastal Bend was a working seafood country — oyster reefs, shrimping grounds, and fishing waters that supported small harbor towns whose fortunes rose and fell with the catch.
The 1930s were hard years across America, but coastal communities had one enduring advantage: the sea kept producing. What such places needed was a way to turn a perishable local catch into something that could travel — to get oysters, shrimp, and fish from the boat to distant tables before they spoiled. Ice and the railroad were the answer, and the business that mastered both could connect a small Gulf harbor to hungry inland cities.
The founding of the Casterline Fish Company belongs to that world. It began not as a grand enterprise but as a "fish house" — a practical link in the chain between the fishermen who worked the water and the markets far from shore that wanted what they hauled in.
People & events
Cecil Weber Casterline started the business in the 1930s, sourcing fish, oysters, and shrimp from local fishermen, packing the catch in barrels of ice, and shipping it by rail to San Antonio and beyond. It was a simple, sturdy model — buy from the boats, ice it down, move it fast — and it put a small Fulton fish house at the center of a regional trade.
The enterprise grew into a genuine family concern. In 1944, Cecil and his father, Frank, purchased the harbor property and acquired several fishing vessels from other fishermen, giving the family a stake not just in handling the catch but in bringing it in. After World War II, Cecil's brother, Leslie Eugene, joined the business, and through the 1950s the family concentrated mostly on processing shrimp and oysters.
Over time the Casterlines went from buying boats to building their own, crafting vessels ranging from about forty to eighty feet — and, in a nice touch that speaks to the family character of the operation, naming most of them for members of the family. The company remained a fixture of the local seafood industry for roughly eight decades until it was sold in 2015 to Prestige Oysters. Even after the sale, its long imprint on Fulton's seafood trade endured.
Its place in the American story
The Casterline Fish Company is a window into the working coastal economy that fed much of America — the network of family-run fish houses that took a local catch and turned it into a regional industry. These businesses rarely made headlines, but collectively they were how the country's inland cities got their seafood, and how small harbor towns earned their living.
It is also a classic American family-business story, spanning generations and adapting as it went: from a one-man fish house to a father-and-son harbor operation, to two brothers processing shrimp and oysters, to a family building and naming its own fleet. That arc — start small, buy in, then build your own — is the shape of countless enterprises that grew up around a natural resource and a family's willingness to work it.
The rhythm of its history, running from the Depression-era 1930s through the postwar decades and into the twenty-first century, mirrors the broader story of the American food economy: local sourcing tied to rail and ice, then steady growth, then consolidation as larger companies absorbed the family firms that built the trade. Eight decades is a long run, and the marker rightly treats that endurance as the point.
If you visit
Fulton is a Gulf Coast harbor town, and the best way to feel the marker's story is to spend a little time near the water where the fishing boats work. The salt air, the docks, the vessels coming and going — this is the living setting of everything the marker describes, and it hasn't stopped being a seafood coast.
Stand near the harbor and picture the business in its prime: local boats unloading their catch, oysters and shrimp packed into barrels of ice, and shipments starting their journey inland toward San Antonio. Then look at the boats around you and remember that the family here eventually built their own, naming them for relatives — a detail worth carrying as you watch a working fleet at rest.
Fulton pairs naturally with the seafood towns of the Coastal Bend, and it's an easy addition to a coastal road trip built around fresh Gulf oysters and shrimp. Let the marker add a layer to the meal: the plate in front of you is the modern end of exactly the kind of local-catch-to-regional-table trade this small fish house helped build over eighty years.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Cecil Weber Casterline
- · Frank Casterline
- · Leslie Eugene Casterline
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Marion Packing Co.
Fulton, TX
The ruined rendering vat here marks the Marion Packing Co., one of a dozen or more meat-packing plants that sprang up around Rockport and Fulton in the 1860s and 1870s to process the vast herds of range cattle roaming Texas after the Civil War. Beef was dried, salted, or pickled for shipment, while tallow, hides, horns, and bones went east to factories. Like most coastal plants, it thrived until about 1880, when driving cattle to northern markets proved more profitable.
Fulton Mansion
Fulton, TX
Built between 1874 and 1877 by cattle-empire partner George Ware Fulton and his wife Harriet, this imposing three-story residence on the Texas coast was named "Oakhurst." A striking example of the French Second Empire style, its plank-wall construction, shell-aggregate concrete basement, and mansard roof housed remarkably modern comforts for its day — central heating, ventilation, indoor plumbing, and gas lighting. The Fulton family lived here until 1895.
Fulton
Fulton, TX
Founded in 1867 by George Ware Fulton on the shore of Aransas Bay, the town of Fulton grew up around fishing and shipping, with schools, churches, and businesses following quickly. A one-room schoolhouse of 1886 was later repurposed as city hall, and in modern times tourism and commercial fishing and shrimping have carried the local economy. Fulton formally incorporated in 1978.
Fulton Volunteer Fire Department
Fulton, TX
In 1947 a runaway agricultural brush fire tore through Fulton, leaping the highway from Copano Village to burn homes, businesses, and ancient live-oak groves. Shaken residents resolved to protect themselves, and in 1948 fifteen men founded the Fulton Volunteer Fire Department, meeting in the schoolhouse and running a 1937 Ford truck donated by Rockport. Sustained for decades by community donations and the annual Oysterfest, the volunteers still serve their Gulf Coast town.