Nuecestown Raid
Corpus Christi, Nueces County, Texas
Marker Inscription
During the reconstruction era in Texas, tensions mounted between Anglo settlers and Mexicans in the Nueces River area. On March 26, 1875, a band of raiders attacked a farm near Nuecestown, stealing livestock and taking some of the settlers prisoner. Forcing their captives to March on foot, they proceeded to Nuecestown. Thomas and Mary Noakes, owners of a general store near this site, were conducting business when the party of raiders arrived. During an attack on the store a customer, John Smith, was shot and seriously wounded. Noakes, who had built trenches under his building for defense purposes, took refuge there after shooting one of the raiders. Mary Noakes, attempting to defend her children and home, was confronted by armed intruders in the store, but was able to help her children escape to the nearby river. Although the family escaped unhurt, the Noakes store was burned. The Nuecestown raid resulted in increased hostilities between Mexican and Anglo settlers of the area. In the following months many innocent Mexicans were slain in retaliatory actions by angry Anglos. It took a special contingent of Texas rangers to finally restore peace and order to the Nueces strip.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On March 26, 1875, amid Reconstruction-era tensions between Anglo settlers and Mexicans along the Nueces River, a band of raiders attacked farms and marched captives toward Nuecestown. When they reached Thomas and Mary Noakes's general store, they wounded a customer and burned the building, though the family escaped by hiding in defensive trenches and fleeing to the river. The raid ignited waves of retaliatory violence in which many innocent Mexicans were killed, and it took Texas Rangers to restore order to the Nueces Strip.
Why it matters
The raid and its brutal aftermath capture the cycle of ethnic violence that defined the contested Nueces Strip in the years after the Civil War.
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Related people
- · Thomas Noakes
- · Mary Noakes
Related events
- · Nuecestown Raid of 1875
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nuecestown (4 Miles North)
Corpus Christi, TX
Henry L. Kinney, founder of Corpus Christi, laid out Nuecestown in 1852 at the first ferry crossing on the Nueces River, luring English and German immigrants with cheap land and cattle. Nicknamed "The Motts" for its clumps of trees, the town gained a hotel, a packery, and one of the county's earliest cotton gins, and after the Civil War became a rendezvous for cattle drovers pointing longhorns north. On Good Friday 1875 raiders plundered and burned much of the settlement; when the railroad bypassed it around 1905, Nuecestown withered, and its post office closed in 1927.
Nuecestown Cemetery
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This cemetery is nearly all that remains of Nuecestown, a community established in 1852 by trader Col. Henry Lawrence Kinney on land he later deeded to settlers. First called "The Motts" for its grove of trees, the town once held a stagecoach inn, ferry, meat-packing plant, cotton gin, school, and churches. Its graves—Confederate veterans, a World War I soldier, a 1919 hurricane victim, and men kidnapped in an 1875 raid—trace the full arc of a frontier settlement that has otherwise vanished.
Nuecestown Schoolhouse
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Nuecestown grew up along the Nueces River after Colonel Henry Lawrence Kinney's 1839 trading post seeded the settlement that became Corpus Christi. Its public school, established before 1885, was among the county's largest by 1893, and this one-room building — raised after two earlier schoolhouses burned — accommodated every grade under a single hipped roof. When district officials closed the school in 1913, its students moved to nearby Calallen, and the schoolhouse survived as one of the settlement's last relics.
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Angelita was one of several rural communities that sprang up in San Patricio County after the Civil War, its 1880s schoolhouse serving as the heart of local life. When the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railroad arrived in 1904, a town was platted and its depot became a shipping point for cattle and crops. But when the post office and school moved to nearby Odem in 1916, Angelita dwindled and finally disappeared.