Zapata County
Zapata, Zapata County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed from Webb and Starr counties; created January 22, 1858; organized April 26, 1858; named in honor of Antonio Zapata, a pioneer stockman of the region, supporter of the Republic of the Rio Grande; county seat, Carrizo, 1858; name later changed to Zapata.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carved from Webb and Starr counties and organized in 1858, this South Texas county along the Rio Grande took its name from Antonio Zapata, a pioneer stockman who backed the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. Its first county seat, Carrizo, was later renamed Zapata as well. The naming honors a borderland figure from the turbulent decades when the lower Rio Grande was contested ground between Mexico and the young Texas state.
Why it matters
It marks the organization of a Rio Grande borderland county and honors the mixed Anglo-Tejano heritage of Texas's frontier settlement.
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Related people
- · Antonio Zapata
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Uribeño.
Zapata vicinity, TX
Uribeño traces its origin to 1803, when a stretch of the Rio Grande known as Porción 41 was granted to José Nicolás Clemente Gutiérrez de Lara for his service in the Spanish army. Despite Indian raids, drought, and flooding, his family established a ranch, and after Mexico won independence in 1821 the growing community took the family's name, numbering 152 people by 1860 with a cemetery, schoolhouse, and store. In the 1950s the federal government's Falcon Dam flooded Uribeño and four neighboring settlements; only its cemetery was relocated to mark where the town had stood.
Old Ramireño
San Ygnacio, TX
Old Ramireño stood on Porción 5, land granted to Don José Luis Ramírez by the King of Spain in 1784 as part of José de Escandón's colonization of Nuevo Santander. Ramírez, his wife María Bacilia Martínez, and their ten children crossed the Rio Grande to build a home here, and their descendants formed the community's core. The settlement saw the Mier Expedition camp there in 1842 and U.S. military activity during the border raids of 1916–17 before Falcon Reservoir forced its relocation in 1953, drowning the original stone ranch house.
In the Vicinity of this Site was Mission Revilla a Visita
Zapata, TX
In 1750, the Spanish crown pressed north of the Rio Grande under José de Escandón's ambitious plan to colonize the frontier province of Nuevo Santander. A visita — a chapel served periodically by a priest riding out from a parent mission — was established here to draw the region's Indigenous people into Spanish settlement and the Catholic faith. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936, its Centennial year, to remember one of the earliest European footholds in the lower Rio Grande country.
Colonization of the Lower Rio Grande Area
Zapata, TX
In 1746 Spanish officials chose José de Escandón, a proven soldier and administrator, to colonize the lower Rio Grande Valley, then the northern frontier of New Spain. Leading more than 700 settlers, soldiers, and missionaries, he founded a string of towns — including Laredo, San Ygnacio, and others — in a district named Nuevo Santander after his home province. Escandón parceled the land into long riverfront tracts called porciones, and the General Visitation of 1767 confirmed private ownership, seeding the ranching culture from which South Texas's great cattle industry grew.