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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the time Sixto E. Garcia opened his doors in 1909, the ranching country of South Texas was knitting itself together into towns. Hebbronville sat in a landscape of vast cattle and sheep ranches, where a rail line and a scattering of storefronts could turn open country into a place with a Main Street. This was the early twentieth century — the era historians call the Progressive and Modern age — when small merchants were the connective tissue of rural life.
In a ranch town, the general store was far more than a place to buy goods. It was where families stocked up before a long drive home, where news traveled, where credit was extended between roundups and harvests. Tejano merchant families — Texans of Mexican descent whose roots in the region often ran deeper than the state itself — were central to that commercial world, building enterprises that anchored their communities.
When Garcia moved the New York Store to this corner in 1924, he was investing in permanence. A two-story brick building with a dressed-up facade was a statement in a town still young: this business intended to last.
People & events
The story here is really the story of one family across a century. Sixto E. Garcia founded the New York Store in 1909 at the corner of Pine and Tilley, then relocated it in 1924 to the building that still carries its name. Under his hand it grew from a general store into something more layered — adding a wing for tailoring and cleaning, the kind of expansion that signals a merchant reading his town's needs and answering them.
The generational hinge came through his daughter, Herlinda. In 1938 she married Blas M. Salinas, a clerk in her father's store — a courtship that unfolded across the counter and shelves of the family business. When Sixto Garcia died in 1944, Herlinda and Blas did not sell or close. They carried the enterprise forward, raising their children in the rooms upstairs while running the store below.
That detail — a family living above the shop it ran — captures something essential. The New York Store was not a business the Salinas family owned so much as a life they lived, work and home stacked one atop the other. More than a century after Sixto Garcia unlocked his first door, the store has remained in the same family's hands.
Its place in the American story
Across small-town America, the family-run general store was once the beating heart of local commerce, and its survival into a second century is genuinely rare. Most were undone by the automobile, the chain store, and the highway that let shoppers drive past. That the New York Store endured, and stayed with one family, makes it an unusually intact witness to a vanished way of doing business.
It also tells a specifically Texan story. The enterprising Tejano merchant families who built and sustained businesses like this one were fundamental to the commercial and social fabric of South Texas ranch towns — not newcomers to the economy but founders of it. Recognizing the store as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2010 affirmed that this heritage is part of the state's core history, not a footnote to it.
In a single storefront you can read the larger American arc: immigration and enterprise, the rise of the small merchant, and the quiet endurance of a family that kept faith with a business through the decades that erased so many others.
If you visit
Stand across the street and let your eye travel up the facade. This is a building meant to be looked at: notice the common-bond brickwork, the little row of tooth-like blocks called a dentil course near the top, and the stepped parapet that rises in tiers above the storefront. These were the flourishes a proud merchant added to say his business had arrived.
Look, too, at the projecting awning over the storefront windows and the second-story windows above. Behind those upper panes were the rooms where the Salinas family actually lived while running the store below — a reminder that this was somebody's whole world, not just a shop.
Hebbronville rewards the traveler willing to leave the interstate for the ranch country of Jim Hogg County. The New York Store makes a fitting anchor for a slow drive through South Texas, where the historic markers speak to a Tejano commercial heritage that shaped the region. Give the building a few unhurried minutes; a century of one family's work is standing right in front of you.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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
Hotel Viggo
Hebbronville, TX
Built in 1915 for owner Viggo Kohler, this Mission Revival hotel welcomed businessmen and travelers to Hebbronville. Soon after opening, it served as a makeshift fortress when area ranchers feared a raid by Pancho Villa's men amid the turmoil along the border. The town's oil boom brought a south wing in 1924, and the hotel has stood as a landmark on the courthouse square ever since.
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.
Barronena Ranch
Realitos, TX
The Barronena Ranch preserves the deep roots of South Texas ranching, on land granted by the Republic of Mexico to Diego Hinojosa and patented under Texas in 1856. Later owners included James O. Luby, an English-born Confederate veteran who became Duval County's first judge, before J. M. Bennett bought the ranch in 1905 and kept it in his family. Its adobe core reportedly served as a stage stop between Goliad and Laredo, and after World War II the King Ranch introduced its famous Santa Gertrudis cattle here.
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.