El Paso de Jacinto

Laredo stands where it does because of two fords. The Handbook of Texas says Tomás Sánchez chose a site downriver from the upstream crossing, which a rider could cross on horseback and which was known then as El Paso de Jacinto after Jacinto de León, who noted it in a report of 1745. Eight miles below town was the Don Miguel, or Garza, ford, shallow enough for sheep and goats. By 1757 the inspector Tienda de Cuervo reported Laredo the usual crossing for travelers from Nuevo León and Coahuila heading for Texas.

What the plaque says

El Paso de Jacinto Throughout history, travelers sought natural fords that allowed safe passage across rivers and streams. Around 1746, Jacinto de Leon discovered such a crossing in this vicinity; it was probably used for centuries before that by indigenous cultures. The ford came to be known as Paso de Jacinto, and around it grew the Laredo community, which began as a ranch established by Tomas Tadeo Sanchez de la Barrera. In 1754, colonizer Jose de Escandon asked Sanchez to find a place for a settlement along the Nueces River. Sanchez failed to identify a suitable location on the Nueces, though, and instead settled in May 1755 along the Rio Grande downstream of Paso de Jacinto. Two years later, Agustin Lopez de la Camara Alta reported that the settlement at the crossing was important in sustaining what had become a major business and military route across the Rio Grande. He also stated that the settlers' pursuits mainly involved breeding cattle and gathering salt from regional salt lakes. Most of the residents' more than 10,000 animals recorded in a census that year were smaller livestock, such as sheep and goats. By the turn of the 19th century, maps indicated the crossing as "Paso de los Indios," and 100 years later, the "Old Indian Crossing" was a well-known landmark near the northern edge of Fort McIntosh. A nearby ranch known as Rancho Paso de los Indios also indicates the significance of the crossing in the history of Laredo, which today features many reminders of the impact of and need for routes across the river. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — steps away
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.
• San Agustín Plaza — 1.1 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 1.1 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• San Agustín Cathedral — 1.2 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.

More markers nearby

• Fort McIntosh — 0.2 mi
• Pvt. David Bennes Cantu Barkley — 0.3 mi
• Jovita Idar — 0.7 mi
• El Primer Congreso Mexicanista — 0.7 mi