Casa Blanca Land Grant

The grant is a paper story; the house is the physical one. Casa Blanca, the White House, stood on Peñitas Creek in what is now Jim Wells County, built of caliche blocks around a square courtyard. A settlement began there about 1754 under Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera y Gallardo, the captain of Laredo. The courtyard well was said to be the end of a tunnel out of the building. A post office served the place from 1860 to 1866, and John L. Wade later platted Wade City beside it. By 1945 only ruins remained.

What the plaque says

Casa Blanca Land Grant The first spanish land grant awarded in what is now Nueces county was the Casa Blanca land grant. Granted in 1798 by the spanish government to Juan Jose de la Garza Montemayor (1765-1816) and his three sons, Juan Manuel, Jose Perfecto, and Jose Agustin, it was located between Penitas Creek and the Nueces River. Originally called Penitas Grant, it consisted of 70,848 acres, or sixteen sitios of land. The Montemayor family established a ranch near Penitas Creek. Since it was near the site of Casa Blanca Fort, it became known as Casa Blanca Ranch. Under continual attack by indians, the ranch remained in the Montemayor family until 1849, when it was purchased by William Mann (1818-1855). Mann later divided the lands and sold portions to area farmers and ranchers. Following his death, his heirs sold 22,000 acres to Richard King. Eventually, oil was discovered in Nueces County, and the owners of the former Casa Blanca Land Grant became oil producers. Today, the principal industries on the Casa Blanca lands are oil and gas production, farming, and ranching. Lands included in the grant now lie in the counties of Nueces (44,042 acres) and Jim Wells (26,806 acres). (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 5.1 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 — 13 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.
• Texas State Aquarium — 25 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• 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

• Nicholas Bluntzer — 0.7 mi
• Santa Margarita Crossing — 2.7 mi
• San Patricio de Hibernia — 3.8 mi
• San Patricio County — 3.8 mi