Judge James Arthur White and the Civilian Conservation Corps at Goliad State Park

White's park began as a land deal. His 1928 plan to highway chairman Ross Sterling took in what he called the Aranama and La Bahía missions, since the presidio was then thought to have been a mission too. Oil leasing kept owners holding out until the 1929 crash lowered prices, and on April 1, 1930, the city and county paid $11,525 for 230.5 acres and granted 207 to the state. The Catholic Church turned down every approach about the presidio. White typed his hundreds of lobbying letters himself, with two fingers.

What the plaque says

Judge James Arthur White and the Civilian Conservation Corps at Goliad State Park Mississippi native and Goliad County Judge James Arthur White (1878-1953) possessed a fervent interest in Texas history, notably that of his adopted city of Goliad. He began in 1928 to organize support for a state park to protect Goliad's many significant historic sites. Judge White drafted a bill in 1931 to create the park and a state-funded bridge and highway (later U.S. 183). Despite the bleak financial prospects of the Depression era, Judge White secured funding and labor from the Federal Civil Works Administration in 1933. When funds were expended by 1934, White applied to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program. Preliminary study of the site began in March 1935. Forty cottages, each to house six men, were constructed in May. The first CCC enrollees to arrive were veterans of the Spanish American War, the Boxer Rebellion in China and World war I. They had their own newspaper, "The Goliad Veteran," and their evening schedules included an extensive educational program. Historians and architects traveled the U. S. and Mexico researching Spanish colonial mission architecture. Supervised by National Park Service architects and local craftsmen, the CCC workers ultimately reconstructed a school-workshop, church and granary at Mission Espiritu Santo and also erected maintenance and shop buildings, a latrine, custodian's lodge, museum and administration building and developed a state park road and picnic facilities. Judge White served on the Texas Centennial Commission, and through his influence Goliad received $100,000 in state and federal funds for Memorial Auditorium (1937) and a burial monument for Col. J. W. Fannin and his men (1939). The CCC camp was closed by June 1941 due to the threat of World War II. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Goliad State Park and Historic Site — steps away
  Mission Espíritu Santo on the San Antonio River, a mission ranch whose herds seeded Texas cattle country, rebuilt from ruin by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
• Presidio La Bahía — 0.7 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 0.8 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 0.9 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Site of the Mission Nuestra Senora del Espiritu Santo de Zuniga — steps away
• Aranama College — steps away
• Cattle Drive from La Bahia — steps away
• Goliad Memorial Auditorium — steps away