Jim Hogg County

Hebbronville, TX

The First United Methodist Church of Hebbronville was organized in December 1912 at Mrs. Ralph McCampbell's ranch, in the heart of South Texas cattle country. For fifteen years its members worshiped alongside the local Baptists in a schoolhouse, until the Edds family donated land for a shared church, completed in 1927. For a century it has served as a beacon for this ranching community.

Bruni, TX

The town of Bruni grew up around Antonio Mateo Bruni, an orphaned Italian immigrant from Emilia-Romagna who came to Texas in the 1870s and built a mercantile and ranching fortune along the border. A railroad station on one of his ranches around 1881 drew a commissary, a school, and eventually a surveyed townsite. Oil strikes in the 1920s and commercial uranium mining from the 1970s gave the settlement successive economic booms.

Realitos, TX

The Barronena Ranch preserves the deep roots of South Texas ranching, on land granted by the Republic of Mexico to Diego Hinojosa and patented under Texas in 1856. Later owners included James O. Luby, an English-born Confederate veteran who became Duval County's first judge, before J. M. Bennett bought the ranch in 1905 and kept it in his family. Its adobe core reportedly served as a stage stop between Goliad and Laredo, and after World War II the King Ranch introduced its famous Santa Gertrudis cattle here.

Mirando City vicinity, TX

For thousands of years the springs of Los Ojuelos were a rare and precious source of water in arid South Texas. A Spanish land grant reached the site in 1810, but Comanche resistance blocked settlement until a Texas Ranger outpost under "Rip" Ford arrived in 1850, letting José María Guerra build the caliche chapel and ranch structures that survive as some of the region's finest Spanish-Mexican architecture. Over the decades the village thrived on the peyote trade—long central to Native American ritual—until oil drilling and the drying of the springs left it nearly abandoned by the 1930s.