HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

The New York Store

Hebbronville, Jim Hogg County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Sixto E. Garcia opened the New York Store in 1909 at Pine and Tilley streets, moving to this location in 1924. The general store later offered a variety of goods and a tailoring and cleaning wing. Garcia's daughter Herlinda married store clerk Blas M. Salinas in 1938. They and their children lived upstairs while continuing the family business after S.E. Garcia's death in 1944. The New York Store has remained in the same family for more than a century. The two-story commercial building features common bond brick with a dentil course and a stepped parapet above storefront windows and a projecting awning. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2010

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Sixto E. Garcia opened the New York Store in Hebbronville in 1909, moving it to this two-story brick building in 1924, where it grew into a general store with a tailoring and cleaning wing. After Garcia's death in 1944, his daughter Herlinda and her husband Blas Salinas carried on the family business while living upstairs. With its dentil course, stepped parapet, and projecting awning, the store has stayed in the same family for more than a century.

Why it matters

The New York Store reflects the enterprising Tejano merchant families whose general stores anchored the commercial and social life of South Texas ranch towns.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Sixto E. Garcia
  • · Herlinda Garcia Salinas
  • · Blas M. Salinas

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Bruni

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.

Oliver Winfield Killam

Mirando City, TX

A Missouri-born lawyer and former Oklahoma legislator, Oliver Winfield Killam came to Texas in 1920 chasing oil. After two dry holes, his Mirando Oil Co. brought in the first commercial well south of San Antonio in 1921, and a gusher that December opened the South Texas oil boom. The instant town of Mirando City he founded swelled to a reported 13,000, sprouting stores, churches, schools, and a post office almost overnight.

Radcliffe Killam

Laredo, TX

Oliver Winfield "O.W." Killam and his wife Harriet, Missouri-educated and ambitious, brought their young son Radcliffe—born in Grove, Oklahoma—to Laredo in 1920, just as the region's oil promise was opening. The Killam family became central figures in South Texas petroleum, and Radcliffe carried that legacy forward through a long life in Laredo business and civic affairs.

Zuniga House

Laredo, TX

Roberto Zuniga crossed from Monterrey, Mexico, to Laredo in 1916 and, with his brother Alfonso, opened a customs brokerage in 1918—an essential trade in a city that lived by cross-border commerce. In 1923 Roberto and his wife Elvira hired the local John O. Buenz Lumber Company to build this house, a comfortable emblem of the family's rising fortunes.