Los Preseños

Collins, the town that replaced Los Preseños, expected the railroad to come to it. It had grown to about 2,000 people when, by the Handbook's account, its residents refused to sell land to the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway. The company moved its townsite three miles west, and a depot called Bandana opened there in 1883. Residents of the new place asked first for a post office named Kleberg, then took the name Alice. Collins dwindled as the railroad town became the busiest cattle-shipping point in South Texas by 1894.

What the plaque says

Los Preseños In 1831, Marcelino Lopez of Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, applied for and was awarded a land grant by the Mexican State of Tamaulipas. The settlement of Los Preseños thus began on the Bank of San Fernando Creek approximately two miles east of present-day Alice. The settlement thrived along a trade route that ran from Corpus Christi to San Diego, Laredo and Eagle Pass. Los Preseños was officially mapped from 1832 until 1878 as a railroad line was being constructed from Corpus Christi to Laredo, passing through the Los Preseños Land Grant. N.G. Collins purchased the property from the Lopez family in 1877. He founded the town of Collins which soon replaced Los Preseños. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Duval County Courthouse — 12 mi
  A red-brick Classical Revival courthouse of 1916 in San Diego, the seat of a county governed for decades by the Parr family machine.
• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 19 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• King Ranch Visitor Center — 19 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 22 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.

More markers nearby

• Alonso S. Perales — 1.4 mi
• Archelaus Bynum Dodson — 1.4 mi
• Jim Wells County Courthouse — 2.5 mi
• Alice — 2.6 mi