Hidalgo County
Edinburg, Hidalgo County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Starr and Cameron counties. Created January 24, 1842. Organized April 7, 1854. Named in Honor of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla -- 1753-1811 Mexican Patriot County Seat, 1852, Edinburgh, name changed February 7, 1861, to Hidalgo. Moved to present site, then called Chapin, October 12, 1908. Name changed to Edinburg, February 3, 1911.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Hidalgo County was carved from Starr and Cameron counties in 1842 and organized in 1854, taking its name from Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest whose 1810 call to arms launched Mexico's independence movement. Its county seat shifted and was renamed more than once—from Edinburgh to Hidalgo, from Chapin to the modern Edinburg—as settlement moved across the lower Rio Grande. The naming reflects the region's deep Mexican heritage on the Texas border.
Why it matters
The county's history captures how the lower Rio Grande Valley grew as a borderland where Texas statehood and Mexican cultural roots intertwined.
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Related people
- · Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Hidalgo County Jail
Edinburg, TX
Erected in 1909-1910, this Spanish-style building with its red tile roof and white walls was among the first structures in Edinburg after the county seat moved there from Old Hidalgo in 1908. After a new jail replaced it in 1922, it served in turn as a community center, meeting place for civic groups, and city hall until 1966 before becoming the Hidalgo County Museum. Its tower still holds a hanging trap used only once, in 1913.
Brushwood Cemetery
Edinburg, TX
Brushwood Cemetery opened in 1913 as the municipal burial ground for Chapin, the newly founded town later renamed Edinburg. Older graves reaching back to 1898 were moved here from El Granjeno near Mission, and today more than a thousand people rest here. Their headstones — Anglo, Spanish, German, and Irish — read like a roster of everyone who built the Rio Grande Valley.
Pharr Volunteer Fire Department
Pharr, TX
In July 1916, the same year Pharr incorporated, a fire destroyed an entire downtown block, wiping out the town's lumber yard, mercantile, hardware store, and theater. When National Guard troops — stationed nearby to guard against raids from revolutionary Mexico — pulled out at the start of World War I, they left behind hose reels that became the community's first firefighting gear. Volunteers organized loosely at first, formed an official department in 1921, and built their first fire station in 1928, with a jail cell tucked in the back.
McAllen Lodge No. 1110, A.F. & A.M.
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Chartered in December 1915 by Master Mason R. M. Bounds and some thirty fellow Masons, this lodge first met in early downtown McAllen commercial buildings before erecting its own temple here in 1927. Its membership drew from many Masonic jurisdictions and included two men who rose to serve as Grand Masters. The lodge has remained an active force in the civic life of McAllen for more than a century.