John Dix

Dix's neighbors left two judgments of him. His obituary, printed by an editor who disagreed with his politics, called him honest and said he knew no halfway ground: if he meant Union, he meant it all over. The same notice credited him with starting the city's first Sunday school, and Sunday school pupils walked in his funeral procession. Dix had landed at Matagorda in February 1834 and settled in Washington County before the Revolution. He died in January 1870 as chief justice of Nueces County, of what the paper took to be typhoid pneumonia.

What the plaque says

John Dix Born in Littleton, Massachusetts, in 1796, John Dix played a significant role in American and state history. As a teenager, he served aboard a privateer during the War of 1812. He was engaged in capturing the English brig Don Cossack, which had left a California port. He soon became a sea captain and was shipwrecked on the island of New Zealand. In 1825 Dix married Mary Eliza Hayes of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and he founded a settlement in Washtenaw County, Michigan, which bears his name. Once his family migrated to Texas, Dix served as a soldier in the Texas Revolution. In October of 1835 he enlisted in the Texian army as a private in the company of Captain James Swisher and served one month at San Antonio de Bexar before being discharged on November 4. In 1849, after fifteen years of farming in the town of independence, the Dix family moved to Nueces County and settled in Corpus Christi where Dix purchased six city lots from the city's founder, Henry L. Kinney. He was a successful sheep rancher, winning prizes at the lone star fair. Dix was appointed as "surveyor and inspector of the revenue for the port of Corpus Christi" by president Franklin Pierce in 1854 and was later reappointed by president James Buchanan in 1858. The Civil War split the Dix family when members took opposite sides. Dix, a pro-union activist, was indicted in 1864 for treason against the Confederate States of America along with eight others. The war ended before any action could be taken against the men. After the war, Dix was appointed chief justice of Nueces County, a position he held until 1869, the year before his death. (2013)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 0.6 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 — 0.8 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 — 1.0 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 — 1.2 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

• Louis de Planque — steps away
• Anna Moore Schwein — steps away
• James Downing — steps away
• Old Bayview Cemetery — steps away