John Bernard Murphy

The plaque leaves out that Murphy fought for the Union. Though he later led the conservative Democrats, the Handbook of Texas says he enlisted during the Civil War in the First Texas Cavalry, a Union regiment commanded by his former law teacher Edmund J. Davis. At the 1875 constitutional convention he opposed measures supporting education, backed the poll tax as a source of revenue, and sought large railroad land grants. Elected mayor of Corpus Christi in 1880, he resigned in 1884 because of poor health and died that July.

What the plaque says

John Bernard Murphy Born in 1821, in Mallow, County Cork, Ireland, John Bernard Murphy immigrated to the United States in 1845. Upon arriving in New Orleans, Murphy joined the United States Army as a staff reporter under General Zachary Taylor at the onset of war with Mexico. Murphy earned the rank of captain before being discharged on October 4, 1846. Murphy began studying law when he married Margaret Mary Healy on May 4, 1849, near Matamoros. Shortly after, the couple relocated to the Irish settlement of San Patricio. Murphy served terms as chief justice and district attorney in both San Patrico and Nueces Counties. He held many positions of trust during his legal and political career, one being a delegate representing Nueces County, Thirteenth District, to the 1875 Texas constitutional convention which wrote a new constitution after reconstruction. First elected in 1880, Murphy became mayor of Corpus Christi. According to city records, as Murphy began his term as mayor, the city was heavily in debt with an empty treasury. By the end of his term, the city's credit was restored and debt repaid. Due to illness, John Bernard Murphy died a few weeks after his resignation, on July 4, 1884. During Murphy's tenure as mayor, the city erected streetlights, dug trenches to divert water, provided means to help the poor and served to preserve law and order. At the time of his death, Corpus Christi boasted several schools, a telephone exchange, an opera house, and a mineral well providing clean drinking water, along with beaches, hotels, sailing and fishing for tourists. John and Margaret adopted two orphants and were active in charity work as well as charter members of the first catholic church in Corpus Christi. The Murphys are buried in Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.3 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.9 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.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.1 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.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.3 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.

More markers nearby

• Mother Margaret Mary Healy Murphy — steps away
• Site of the Corpus Christi Lighthouse — steps away
• Lone Star Fair — steps away
• The Corpus Christi Caller-Times — steps away