Joseph French Green and La Quinta Mansion

The plaque starts with Green managing Sinton's Catarina Ranch, which lay not near Gregory but in Dimmit County. By 1910 Green had turned the ranch's cattle pens on the new Asherton and Gulf Railway into a small town, with a bunkhouse, commissary, hotel, post office and schoolhouse. It became known for the Taft House, a costly mansion Charles Taft supposedly built with oversized bathtubs for his brother the president. Catarina Farms later added roads, waterworks and imported citrus trees, and by 1929 perhaps 1,000 to 2,500 people lived there. Water shortages and the Depression emptied it.

What the plaque says

Joseph French Green and La Quinta Mansion Ohio native Joseph French Green arrived in South Texas after the building of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad. During a lawsuit in 1886, the opposing counsel, David Sinton, was so impressed by Green that he hired him to manage the 224,000-acre Catarina Ranch near Gregory. Four years later, Sinton appointed Green the manager of the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company, which spanned Aransas and San Patricio counties. Green was responsible for renovating the ranch by introducing new farming methods, crops and cattle breeds. Joseph Green married Mae Mathis, the daughter of Thomas Mathis, a founder of the Coleman, Mathis, Fulton Cattle Company. Green built his new bride La Quinta mansion in 1906-07. The home was a three-story mansion overlooking Corpus Christi Bay three miles south of Gregory. The mansion was built large enough to accommodate guests to the ranch, with twelve bedrooms and six baths. The second floor included a gallery, and the top floor had an observation deck. President William Howard Taft, half-brother to Charles P. Taft, majority owner of the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company, was one of the first guests to stay at La Quinta. During his stay in Oct. 1909, the ranch hosted a rodeo and barbecue in his honor. On Nov. 20, 1926, Joseph Green died from surgery complications. At the time of his death, he was president of the Taft Bank and the First National Bank of Gregory, and on the board of both the Odem and Sinton banks. He was laid to rest in the Taft Cemetery. La Quinta was the core of the region, and was known as the "White House of the Taft Ranch." In Jan. 1938, the mansion was ruined by fire. (2013)

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

• Gregory — 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