Gregory

The plaque says the town was named for Thomas W. Gregory, a Fulton family friend and later attorney general; his record in that office was contentious. Born in Mississippi in 1861 and trained in law at the University of Texas, he practiced in Austin and prosecuted antitrust suits for the state, including the Waters-Pierce case. Woodrow Wilson made him attorney general in 1914, and he declined a Supreme Court seat in 1916. In World War I he helped frame the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which curbed free speech and press, and directed prosecutions of more than 2,000 war opponents.

What the plaque says

Gregory The town of Gregory traces its beginnings to 1886, the year the San Antonio and Aransas Pass railroad built a line through San Patricio county. The railroad and the local Coleman-Fulton pasture company joined forces to build a station here at a site known as Corpus Christi junction, a switch where the rail line turned toward Corpus Christi and branched off to Aransas Pass. By 1887 the junction was known as Gregory, named for Thomas W. Gregory, a friend of the Fulton Family and later U.S. attorney general. A U.S. Post Office opened on March 8, 1887, and the new community grew quickly, soon boasting stores, hotels, banks, and other businesses, as well as a school and several churches. As many as seven trains passed through the junction on daily round-trip schedules. By 1900 the town's population had reached 400, and the community received another boost when the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company relocated its main office here from Rockport. The company built the 3-story green hotel in 1909, and many train travelers relied on Gregory as a stopover point. Although the company headquarters and the Green Hotel both relocated to taft in the 1920's, the town survived and remains a viable residential community. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 9.5 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 — 9.7 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 9.9 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.
• Mirador de la Flor — 11 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

• Joseph French Green and La Quinta Mansion — steps away
• Site of Bay View College — 4.1 mi
• Site of Indian Point Mass Grave of 1919 Hurricane Victims — 5.8 mi
• Rincon Ranch — 5.9 mi