Los Preseños
Alice, Jim Wells County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1831, Marcelino Lopez of Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, applied for and was awarded a land grant by the Mexican State of Tamaulipas. The settlement of Los Preseños thus began on the Bank of San Fernando Creek approximately two miles east of present-day Alice. The settlement thrived along a trade route that ran from Corpus Christi to San Diego, Laredo and Eagle Pass. Los Preseños was officially mapped from 1832 until 1878 as a railroad line was being constructed from Corpus Christi to Laredo, passing through the Los Preseños Land Grant. N.G. Collins purchased the property from the Lopez family in 1877. He founded the town of Collins which soon replaced Los Preseños. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1831, while Texas was still part of Mexico, Marcelino Lopez of Camargo secured a land grant from the state of Tamaulipas and founded Los Preseños on San Fernando Creek. The little settlement thrived on a trade route linking Corpus Christi with Laredo, San Diego, and Eagle Pass, and appeared on maps for nearly half a century. When N.G. Collins bought out the Lopez family in 1877 and platted the town of Collins, Los Preseños faded into memory.
Why it matters
It marks the Mexican-era roots of South Texas settlement, a reminder that ranching and trade communities flourished here under Mexican land grants long before the towns that replaced them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1831, the land where South Texas ranch communities would grow was not part of the United States, nor even of an independent Texas. It belonged to Mexico, and specifically to the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which stretched up from the Rio Grande. This was the Early Republic era from the American vantage point, but here it was still Mexican soil, governed by Mexican law and settled under Mexican land grants.
The country between the Rio Grande and the Nueces was open, dry, and threaded by seasonal creeks. Settlement clustered where there was water and where trade could pass. A grant of land here was not a suburban lot; it was the right to build a ranching and trading community on a specific stretch of ground, often along a creek that could sustain livestock and travelers.
By the time this settlement was founded on the bank of San Fernando Creek, families from towns like Camargo, just across the river in Tamaulipas, were pushing north to claim and work such grants. They carried a ranching culture centuries in the making, and they planted communities decades before the Anglo-American towns that would later overshadow them.
People & events
The founder was Marcelino Lopez of Camargo, Tamaulipas. In 1831 he applied for and received a land grant from the state of Tamaulipas, and with it began the settlement of Los Preseños on the bank of San Fernando Creek, roughly two miles east of where Alice stands today.
The little community did not merely survive; it thrived, because it sat on a working trade route. Traffic ran through here between Corpus Christi and the towns of the interior and border — Laredo, San Diego, and Eagle Pass. A settlement astride a trade road becomes a place where goods, animals, and news change hands, and Los Preseños earned its place on the maps, appearing on them from 1832 onward for nearly half a century.
The turning point came in 1877, when N.G. Collins purchased the property from the Lopez family. As a railroad line was pushed through from Corpus Christi toward Laredo — a line whose route crossed this very land grant — Collins founded a new town, called Collins, which soon replaced the older settlement. Los Preseños, having been mapped for decades, faded from the living landscape into memory.
Its place in the American story
Los Preseños is a reminder that the American story in this region did not begin with the American flag. Long before Texas towns bore Anglo names, families operating under Mexican land grants had already built ranching and trading communities here. The roots of South Texas settlement are Mexican roots, and this marker keeps that fact visible.
The settlement's rise and disappearance also trace a larger national transformation: the arrival of the railroad. Across the country in the late nineteenth century, the placement of a rail line decided which communities would flourish and which would wither. When the tracks came through and a new town platted itself along them, the older settlement — however venerable — could not compete. Los Preseños is one small casualty of a pattern that redrew the map of the entire nation.
It belongs, too, to the American genre of the ghost town: a place that was real, mapped, and populated, and then was gone. Such places tell us that the settled landscape we take for granted was contingent all along, shaped by grants, routes, and rail decisions that could just as easily have gone another way.
If you visit
There is no bustling town to tour here — that is the point. The marker asks you to stand near modern Alice and imagine the ground about two miles east, along San Fernando Creek, where a community once lived and traded. The land itself is the artifact.
Look to the creek and the lay of the land, and think about why people chose this spot: water, and a road that carried travelers between Corpus Christi and the border towns. If you have driven in from the coast or the border, you have loosely retraced a route that gave this settlement its livelihood.
Fold it into a South Texas road trip as a quiet, contemplative stop between the bigger destinations. It rewards a slow moment and a little imagination more than a camera — the kind of place where the history is in what is no longer there, and in knowing that Mexican-era families were building communities here long before the towns that replaced them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Marcelino Lopez
- · N.G. Collins
Themes & tags
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