Historical Marker
Elihu Harrison Ropes
Nueces County · Texas
Erected 1985
Ropes was a soldier before he was a promoter. The Handbook of Texas says he joined the Union Army at sixteen, served three years, and rose to colonel in the New Jersey Guard, then returned to Elizabethtown to publish a newspaper and manage advertising for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. After an 1888 visit to Galveston he picked Corpus Christi for a deep port, formed the Port Ropes Company with five million dollars in stock, and bought Mustang Island for $25,000. His railroad toward South America got only a few miles of grade, in 1890.
What the plaque says
Elihu Harrison Ropes Speculator and developer Elihu Harrison Ropes (1845-1898) had been a publisher, realtor, and insurance agent in New Jersey before coming to Texas on a vacation during the late 1880s. A venture along the Gulf Coast resulted in his plan to develop a deepwater port for Corpus Christi in order to promote industrial development and thus stimulate the town's growth and economy. Ropes' dream for Corpus Christi also included building a railroad from the port to the lower Rio Grande Valley and the development of the Port Aransas cliffs along what is now Ocean Drive. Backed by Eastern investors, Ropes began his plan to dredge a 14-mile channel through Mustang Island. His equipment, however, was constantly in need of repair, and when the financial Panic of 1893 hit the country, the project was abandoned. Likewise, his dream for the cliffs resort area was not fully realized, as the grand hotel he constructed, known as the Alta Vista (burned 1927), was never opened to the public. When the Panic of 1893 led Ropes' financial supporters to withhold their money, Ropes left Corpus Christi for New York, where he died in 1898. Although Ropes' goals lay unfulfilled, they did stimulate an interest in Corpus Christi's potential for development. (1985)
Where it stands
27.75416, -97.37650 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Mirador de la Flor — 3.1 miCorpus 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 — 4.0 miPhilip 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 — 4.2 miA 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.
- USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 4.3 miAn Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.