Chapman Ranch

The plaque says the town had dwindled away by 1941, and it did shrink, but it never emptied. The Handbook of Texas counts 25 residents in 1933 and about 100 from 1945 on. A post office opened in 1926 with Charles C. Simpson as postmaster. The school took the name Santa Cruz from the old King Ranch water well that stood on the site, and two school buildings dated 1925 still stand. Chapman Ranch students now attend Corpus Christi schools. The place is a small farm community on Farm Road 70, with the Chapman heirs still running the land.

What the plaque says

Chapman Ranch In Jan. 1919, Philip Alexander Chapman (1847-1924) purchased 34,631 acres of the Laureles Division of the King Ranch for development as farm lands similar to others he owned in east Texas and Oklahoma. He sent his son, J.O. Chapman (1883-1953), to supervise operations. Arriving in Sept. 1919, J.O. Chapman began dividing "Nueces Farms" into 160-acre tracts and leasing them to tenants. In 1924, the name was changed to Chapman Ranch. The town, founded in 1925, had a hospital, cotton gin, 2 schools, its own power plant, and "The Commissary", which housed grocery, hardware, and mercantile stores, a barber shop, soda fountain, automobile agency, service station, post office, and ranch headquarters offices. In 1926, over 20,000 acres were in cultivation. The ranch contracted with manufacturers to test modern farm equipment. Several implements were invented here. In the late 1920's, Chapman Ranch was advertised as the world's largest mechanized farm. During the 1930's, the ranch conducted extensive crop experiments, and developed a superior strain of long-staple cotton, the seed of which was marketed worldwide. By 1941, the town had dwindled away, and the land was partitioned among P.A. Chapman's children, whose heirs continue to operate the ranch. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Padre Island National Seashore — 15 mi
  About sixty-six miles of undeveloped barrier beach south of Corpus Christi, where more Kemp's ridley sea turtles nest than anywhere else in the United States.
• Mirador de la Flor — 15 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 16 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.
• Texas State Aquarium — 16 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.

More markers nearby

• Jovita González de Mireles — 5.8 mi
• Sunshine Cemetery — 8.9 mi
• Stanley L. Kostoryz — 9.5 mi
• Moravian Club of Nueces County — 9.5 mi