Site of Jose Antonio Navarro Ranch Headquarters

🏛️The era

The land around this marker has passed through three nations. In the 1700s Spain set it aside as ranch land for Mission San José in San Antonio, about twenty miles north. The Spanish missions in Texas relied on large herds of cattle, and the mission ranches scattered across this brush country helped lay the foundations of Texas ranching.

By the 1820s Mexico had won its independence from Spain, and much of this mission land stood empty. The new Mexican government handed out land grants to encourage settlement, and well-connected residents of San Antonio, then the leading town of Mexican Texas, sought pasture in the surrounding country.

The decades that followed brought upheaval after upheaval. There was the Texas Revolution in 1836, then a decade as an independent republic, statehood in 1845, and finally the Civil War. Few people lived through every one of those changes as closely as the man who held this ranch. To follow his life is to follow the making of Texas itself.

👥People & events

José Antonio Navarro was born in San Antonio in 1795, a Tejano, meaning a Texan of Mexican heritage. In 1828 he petitioned the governor of the Mexican state for four leagues of pasture land on the Atascosa River. The grant was officially confirmed in 1831, though he may have been running the ranch even before then.

In 1836 Navarro took one of the boldest steps of his life and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. He was one of only a few native-born Tejanos to do so. For years after that, business and politics kept him busy elsewhere, and Texas history records him as a public figure who championed Tejano rights in the new republic and state.

By 1853, though, Navarro had brought his ranching interests together here. He spent summers in a log house above the Atascosa River, registered his cattle brand in Atascosa County in 1856, and in 1857 donated land for a county seat. That honor was short-lived, because the seat moved to Pleasanton the next year. The 1860 census found nearly 18,000 acres carrying 400 cattle, 200 hogs, 35 horses and 12 oxen. As early as 1867, someone even noted oil on the land.

After the Civil War, Navarro handed the ranch over to his sons. When he died in San Antonio in 1871, the land was divided among his five children. It stayed in the family for another generation, until his son Sixto Eusebio Navarro, born in 1833, sold the old ranch home in 1894.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Navarro's life is a strong rebuttal to the simplified version of the Texas Revolution as a fight between Anglo settlers and Mexicans. Tejanos fought, voted and signed on the side of independence, and Navarro was one of the most prominent of them. His story is essential to an honest account of how Texas, and through it a large part of the American Southwest, joined the United States.

The ranch also tells a quieter national story about land and cattle. American ranching did not appear from nowhere on the Great Plains. Much of its vocabulary, its methods and even its land titles grew out of Spanish missions and Mexican land grants like this one. Here, a mission ranch, a Mexican grant and an American family ranch overlie one another on the same soil.

Finally, the passing mention of oil in 1867 hints at what Texas would become. Decades later, petroleum transformed the state's economy and the nation's. Seeing it noted on a cattle ranch in Reconstruction-era records is a small window onto the shift from one kind of wealth to the next.

🧭If you visit

The log house and ranch buildings described on this marker belong to the past. The marker identifies the site, so come for the setting and the story more than for standing structures. Take a few minutes to look out at the countryside and picture it as open pasture running down toward the Atascosa River, with a summer cabin on the high ground above the water.

It helps to keep the layers in mind as you stand here: Spanish mission herds first, then a Mexican grant, then a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence tending his cattle in his later years. Few roadside markers pack that much of Texas history into a single patch of ground.

The Poteet area is an easy drive south of San Antonio, and it pairs naturally with a visit to Mission San José in the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. The mission once claimed this land as its ranch. Seeing the mission and then this site makes the connection between them come alive.