Alice

Alice learned to read in a boardinghouse. The first school opened in 1888 on the second floor of the Becham Place with nine pupils, and before 1886 anyone wanting more went to Goliad College. Newspapers followed: the Reporter in 1892, El Eco in 1896, and in 1903 Eulalio Velázquez's Spanish-language El Cosmopolita. A fire in 1909 destroyed half the business section, and a public library opened in 1935. Around 1966 Mexican American students boycotted Alice High School to protest discrimination in the schools, in a town where most residents were Mexican American.

What the plaque says

Alice In the 1880s, when the lines of the Corpus Christi, San Diego, & Rio Grande and the San Antonio & Aransas Pass railroads intersected, a new townsite was platted at the junction in what was then Nueces County. First called Bandana and then Kleberg, the town was finally named Alice (for Alice King Kleberg) when a post office was granted in 1888. Homes, business, schools, and churches were soon established. Texas Rangers serving in south Texas were headquartered in Alice. P. A. Presnall was elected the first mayor in 1904. Alice became the county seat of newly created Jim Wells County in 1911. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Duval County Courthouse — 10 mi
  A red-brick Classical Revival courthouse of 1916 in San Diego, the seat of a county governed for decades by the Parr family machine.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 19 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 21 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 25 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• Jim Wells County Courthouse — steps away
• Jim Wells County — 0.9 mi
• Alonso S. Perales — 1.6 mi
• Archelaus Bynum Dodson — 1.6 mi