Great Land Lottery of Aransas Pass

The lottery of 1909 was the town's second boom; the Handbook of Texas tells the first. In 1890 the Aransas Pass Harbor Company and the Aransas Harbor City and Improvement Company set out to dig a channel and build Harbor City, and the Hoyt Hotel opened in 1893 for prospects. That year's panic and a failed channel emptied the place. The promoters handed their $401,554 project to the federal government, the Corps of Engineers took it on in 1899, and by 1907 deep water reached Harbor Island. The lottery land came from a deal for Mary McCampbell's 12,000 acres.

What the plaque says

Great Land Lottery of Aransas Pass In 1909, real estate developers E.O. Burton and A.H. Danforth embarked upon a land promotion scheme to take advantage of available land in Aransas Pass. They hired journalist W.H. Vernor to produce the "Aransas Pass Progress", which promoted Aransas Pass and the pending land sale across the country by U.S. Mail. Promoter A.D. Powers was hired to carefully handle the sale to avoid its being seen as a lottery by the postal department. Six thousand tickets, each representing a town lot, were sold for $100 each. Ticket holders were then to come to Aransas Pass to bid on lots; they were not to bid more than $100, and thus the tickets could be exchanged directly for lots. Nearly all 6,000 lots were sold during the auction sales in December 1909. All went well until postal inspectors who had secured tickets purposefully overbid, which muddled the sale and led to several legal battles. As a result of the great land lottery of 1909, Aransas Pass did see substantial growth. The money collected in overbids went into a trust that eventually served to fund public and school libraries, including the one at this site. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Aransas — 6.8 mi
  The fishing town at the north end of Mustang Island, reached by a free state ferry that crosses the ship channel day and night, with a university marine lab begun in a one-room shack.
• Fulton Mansion State Historic Site — 12 mi
  A French Second Empire house of 1874-77 on Aransas Bay, paid for with hides and tallow, with gas lights, central heat and hot running water no other house nearby had.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 16 mi
  An 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.
• 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

• John Wiebel VFW Post 2932 — steps away
• First United Methodist Church of Aransas Pass — 0.5 mi
• Terminal Railroad — 0.7 mi
• Late Pleistocene Ingleside Fauna — 4.0 mi