Lagarto College
Lagarto, Live Oak County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Site of Live Oak County's only college. Opened 1884, with 4 teachers. Promoted locally to further town's growth (population 500). Once-prosperous Lagarto failed after 2 railroad bypasses. School closed, 1895. Two story building was moved and used as a ranch house.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Lagarto College opened in 1884 with four teachers, the only college Live Oak County would ever have, promoted by townsfolk hoping to grow their community of 500. But when two railroads bypassed Lagarto, the once-prosperous town withered and the school closed in 1895. Its two-story building was hauled away to serve out its days as a ranch house.
Why it matters
The college's rise and fall shows how completely the railroad decided which Texas towns would thrive and which would vanish, taking their institutions with them.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Dobie Ranch, Birthplace of J. Frank Dobie
Lagarto, TX
On this brush-country ranch in 1888 was born J. Frank Dobie, the folklorist who became one of the great chroniclers of the Southwest. A fierce individualist, he gathered and published more than thirty volumes of folk tales and legends, preserving the voices of the rancher, the miner, and the cowboy. His work gave the everyday people of South Texas a place in American literature.
Murphy Ranch House
Mathis, TX
In 1875, San Patricio chief justice Patrick Frances Murphy and his wife Elizabeth — daughter of the empresario James McGloin — bought "The Point at Echo" and built this modest Greek Revival house on the east bank of the Nueces, using cypress hauled by oxen from Indianola. The property later passed to Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy, widow of Patrick's brother, who devoted her fortune to founding a church campus in San Antonio with a convent and a free school for Black children, established what the marker calls the first order of nuns in Texas, and used this ranch house for retreats before selling it to sustain her mission.
Old Dougherty House
San Patricio, TX
Robert Dougherty, a refugee from the Irish famine of the 1840s, built this house on Round Lake in 1876 to open St. Paul's Academy for Boys. Educated in Kentucky and seasoned as a journalist, merchant, and seminary principal in Corpus Christi, he taught an unusually broad curriculum for the era—geography, history, mathematics, Latin, Greek, classical literature, and even Gaelic. His commitment to learning ran so deep that all seven of his children began their working lives as teachers.
Saint Patrick's Catholic Church
San Patricio, TX
About 1829, empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin recruited Irish Catholic families to found the colony of San Patricio de Hibernia in Mexican Texas, and by 1830 the settlers had established St. Patrick's Catholic Church under the Rev. Henry Doyle. Fire, hurricanes, and storms repeatedly destroyed its buildings, yet the congregation rebuilt again and again across nearly two centuries. For a time in the 1870s and 1880s, Sisters of Mercy relocated here and ran a convent and school after a hurricane wrecked their facilities at Indianola.