Banquete, C.S.A.

The plaque tells you what the road carried; the drivers are the other half. Cotton came out of East Texas on wagons driven by white and Black teamsters, among them at least one Black woman. At San Antonio it was gathered into trains driven by Tejano and Mexican teamsters, who reached the Rio Grande in six to eight weeks in good weather. The trip meant hunger, dust, outlaws, Indian attacks and later Union raiders. Across the river, as many as seventy European ships at a time waited at Bagdad to trade goods for the bales.

What the plaque says

Banquete, C.S.A. In the critical civil war years, Banquete meant water, supplies, repairs and defenses to thousands on arid trips along the Cotton Road to Mexico. The Cotton Road was well known, for it followed a segment of the historic "King's Highway" of early explorers. Yet its vital role for 4 years in supplying the confederacy earned it undying fame. It was the way to Mexico's border towns of Bagdad and Matamoros, where 20,000 speculators clamored for cotton, using valuable European goods to make attractive bargains. To get guns, ammunition, shoes, clothing, medicines--necessities scarce at home--the confederacy sent to neutral Mexico long trains of 5 to 15 wagons or ox carts that lumbered for many weeks over the desert. Sometimes to lighten a load for an exhausted team, cotton bales might be hidden in roadside brush. The traffic left signs in the wilds. Often the landscape would whiten with the lint thorned off passing loads. Banquete's water made possible the long hauls to Mexico and back to the goods-hungry confederate population. Thus the town named for an 1832 fiesta honoring Texas colonists served a strategic role in the history of the civil war, 1861-65. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 11 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 — 18 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.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 21 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 25 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.

More markers nearby

• Banquete Cemetery — 0.8 mi
• Battle of Agua Dulce — 6.4 mi
• Casa Blanca Land Grant — 6.4 mi
• Nicholas Bluntzer — 7.1 mi