Gregory
Gregory, San Patricio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The town of Gregory traces its beginnings to 1886, the year the San Antonio and Aransas Pass railroad built a line through San Patricio county. The railroad and the local Coleman-Fulton pasture company joined forces to build a station here at a site known as Corpus Christi junction, a switch where the rail line turned toward Corpus Christi and branched off to Aransas Pass. By 1887 the junction was known as Gregory, named for Thomas W. Gregory, a friend of the Fulton Family and later U.S. attorney general. A U.S. Post Office opened on March 8, 1887, and the new community grew quickly, soon boasting stores, hotels, banks, and other businesses, as well as a school and several churches. As many as seven trains passed through the junction on daily round-trip schedules. By 1900 the town's population had reached 400, and the community received another boost when the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company relocated its main office here from Rockport. The company built the 3-story green hotel in 1909, and many train travelers relied on Gregory as a stopover point. Although the company headquarters and the Green Hotel both relocated to taft in the 1920's, the town survived and remains a viable residential community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Gregory began in 1886 when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass railroad laid track through San Patricio County, and the rail company joined the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company to build a station at the junction where the line split toward Corpus Christi and Aransas Pass. Named by 1887 for Thomas W. Gregory — a Fulton family friend and future U.S. attorney general — the town grew fast with stores, hotels, banks, and up to seven trains a day. It got another lift when the pasture company moved its headquarters here and built the three-story Green Hotel in 1909, and it endured as a residential community even after the company later relocated to Taft.
Why it matters
Gregory shows how a railroad junction and a big landholding company together could conjure a town from open pasture, the pattern behind much of South Texas's settlement.
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Related people
- · Thomas W. Gregory
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of West Portland
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After the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad reached this area in the 1880s, a 1908 land deal handed 14,000 acres to an Iowa promoter who mounted a huge advertising campaign, drawing trainloads of prospective buyers—mostly from Kansas—to settle West Portland. Mexican migrant workers cleared the mesquite and farmers worked the rich black soil, building a school that doubled as a community center and, in 1922, a cooperative cotton gin that became the heart of the district. The school consolidated with Taft in 1939, but descendants of the original settlers still own much of the land.
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Nuecestown (4 Miles North)
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Henry L. Kinney, founder of Corpus Christi, laid out Nuecestown in 1852 at the first ferry crossing on the Nueces River, luring English and German immigrants with cheap land and cattle. Nicknamed "The Motts" for its clumps of trees, the town gained a hotel, a packery, and one of the county's earliest cotton gins, and after the Civil War became a rendezvous for cattle drovers pointing longhorns north. On Good Friday 1875 raiders plundered and burned much of the settlement; when the railroad bypassed it around 1905, Nuecestown withered, and its post office closed in 1927.