George H. Paul Building Site

Robstown grew where two railroads crossed, and the older line had the longer story. The Corpus Christi, San Diego and Rio Grande Narrow Gauge was chartered in 1875, ran three-foot-gauge track to San Diego by 1879, and reached Laredo in September 1881 as the Texas Mexican Railway. Lott and Kenedy sold it that year to the syndicate building the Mexican National, which ran it until 1889. The crossing with the Brownsville line became a town, named for Robert Driscoll. The Handbook of Texas dates the founding to about 1906; the plaque says 1903.

What the plaque says

George H. Paul Building Site Robstown began in 1903 at the merger point of the Texas-Mexican and the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railroads. The town grew rapidly after the arrival of land developer George H. Paul. He organized the George H. Paul Land Co., acquired about 300,000 acres of land from nearby ranches, and subdivided the property into cotton farms. Special trains transported Paul's land agents to the East and Midwest to interest prospective buyers in the area. The hub of activities in the new community was the Paul Building, a two story red brick structure erected at this location in 1908. Its first floor was occupied by the Howard and Jacoby General Store. The multi-purpose building also housed Robstown's first school and a community room where church services were held. A windmill and well behind the structure provided the town's water supply. The Guaranty State Bank, organized in 1913 by William H. ("Bill") Daimwood, occupied the Paul Building in 1924. Renamed the State National Bank of Robstown in 1925, it was noted for its stability in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Paul Building was demolished in 1972, after the structure became unsafe, and a new bank facility was erected at the site. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 15 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 17 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 — 17 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.
• Mirador de la Flor — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Stout Jackson & The Carpa Theaters — 0.6 mi
• Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanitorium — 6.0 mi
• Nuecestown Cemetery — 6.1 mi
• Calallen — 6.1 mi