First National Bank of Beeville

The bank is easiest to read through its paper. The First National Bank of Beeville organized on January 13, 1890, and received national charter 4238 on February 20. L. B. Randall was president until 1909, with Berkley Ward Klipstein as cashier from 1890 to 1911 and president from 1912 to 1918. Its $10 and $20 notes came in 1882, 1902 and 1929 designs, 63,644 notes worth $790,270 at issue. Circulation peaked at $50,000 in 1910. Recorded resources were lowest at $133,592 in 1894 and highest at $1,500,747 in 1935.

What the plaque says

First National Bank of Beeville Beeville, the county seat of the Bee County since 1860, did not have a secure bank until 1890, when the First National Bank of Beeville opened for business. Prior to that year, the town's only banking facility was A.C. Jones' general store, where some area residents stored money under a loose floorboard behind the counter. The increases in population and trade volume brought by the arrival of the San Antonio & Aransas Pass and the Gulf, Western Texas & Pacific Railways in the late 1880s made the establishment of a bank necessary. In December of 1889 thirty investors met and organized the First National Bank of Beeville and elected A.C. Jones, Louis B. Randall, B.W. Klipstein, J.H. O'Connor, Viggo Kohler, J.C. Wood and J.R. Hoxie to the first board of directors. The First National Bank of Beeville operated on the courthouse square until 1894, when it relocated to the vicinty of the railroad depot. Functioning at that site for 66 years, the bank moved in 1960 and again in 1984 to be near major auto routes. It is one of the few banks in South Texas to have been independent and locally owned and operated for one hundred years. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 25 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.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 27 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Presidio La Bahía — 27 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 27 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Saint Joseph's Catholic Church — 0.6 mi
• Barnard Elliott Bee, Sr. — 0.9 mi
• First Methodist Church of Beeville — 0.9 mi
• Beeville on the Poesta — 0.9 mi