Hotel Brendle
Robstown, Nueces County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The community of Robstown developed around the traffic generated by the junction of the Texas-Mexican and the St. Louis, Brownsville, & Mexico railroads. In 1914 C.C. Brendle and V.V. Elick purchased land at this site for the purpose of constructing a hotel as close as possible to the railroad station. Completed the same year, the hotel Brendle opened with 36 rooms and became a center of activity for the community. For many years the hotel provided space for traveling salesmen to display their goods. C.C. Brendle (1859-1929) was a local gin operator, developer, and area farmer who came to Robstown in 1908. His partner in the hotel, V.V. Elick, also was a partner in his gin interests. The hotel passed out of the hands of the Brendle Family during the great depression and later was owned by the Sons of Hermann, a German fraternal organization. Interesting architectural features of the three-story hotel include a brick parapet, a red tile roof supported on brackets, and a semi-circular arch over the doorway. The Hotel Brendle stands as a reminder of Robstown's early commercial growth. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1984
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Robstown sprang up where two railroads crossed, and in 1914 local businessmen C.C. Brendle and V.V. Elick built a hotel as near the depot as they could manage. Its 36 rooms quickly became the town's social hub, doubling as a showroom where traveling salesmen laid out their wares. Passing through hard times and later German fraternal ownership, the three-story building — with its brick parapet, red tile roof, and arched doorway — still recalls the boomtown energy of early-century South Texas.
Why it matters
The Hotel Brendle captures how the railroad remade small-town America, turning rail junctions into commercial magnets almost overnight.
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Related people
- · C.C. Brendle
- · V.V. Elick
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Calallen
Corpus Christi, TX
Calallen was platted in 1910 by the Calvin Townsite Company and named for cattleman Calvin J. Allen, rising on the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico rail line where plentiful water made it a farming hub for Nueces County. Between the 1920s and 1940s it supported a hotel, bank, funeral home, packing firm, and school district, drawing prominent South Texas cattlemen and merchants. New roads then funneled growth toward Corpus Christi, which annexed the town in 1970.
Sharpsburg and Borden's Ferry
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In the 1870s Sharpsburg blossomed into a South Texas trade hub as Sidney Gail Borden ran a store, cotton gin, gristmill, and meat packery and expanded a ferry across the Nueces River. Flat-bottomed sailing vessels carried local goods downriver to markets like Corpus Christi, drawing farmers from twenty-five miles around. The town peaked in the 1890s, then faded when the railroads bypassed it, and today its site has returned to ranchland.
Cattle Drives from South Texas
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By 1840 tens of thousands of wild longhorns roamed the brush country between the Rio Grande and the Gulf, so plentiful they were nearly worthless to the Texans who owned them. Ranchers began trailing small herds toward distant markets — New Orleans, Missouri, Ohio, even California and Chicago — but the real boom came after the Civil War, when hungry Northern cities and advancing railroads finally made the long drives pay. Feeder trails near here fed the great Chisholm and Dodge City routes to the Kansas railheads, and by 1880 some four million head had gone up the trail.
Eli Todd Merriman
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Eli Todd Merriman came to Corpus Christi with his family in 1865 and, at eighteen, took up typesetting for the weekly Nueces Valley. In 1876 he co-founded the Corpus Christi Free Press, and after buying out his partner he built the paper that, sold and renamed in 1883, became the Corpus Christi Caller, today's Caller-Times. Known as the "Dean of Texas Newspaper Men," he later championed a deep-water port and the preservation of the old Bayview Cemetery, where he was buried in 1941.