Louisiana-Rio Grande Canal Company

The company's name told buyers who was behind it. Henry N. Pharr, a Louisiana sugarcane grower, and J. C. Kelley owned 16,000 acres here by 1909, and Pharr built the canals for a sugar plantation. That plantation failed when the Valley's sugarcane industry collapsed. Kelley took over the irrigation system and kept selling water to vegetable and cotton farms, while his Pharr Townsite Company platted the town named for his partner. By 1911 the railroad stopped there, and 4,000 acres had been sold to settlers.

What the plaque says

Louisiana-Rio Grande Canal Company Wisconsin native John Closner established the first steam-powered irrigation system in the lower Rio Grande Valley in 1895. Closner successfully grew sugar cane and entered a sample for judging at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. The award-winning sugar cane and Closner's promotion of the lower Rio Grande convinced a number of financiers and agriculturists to invest in the region's irrigation and development possibilities. In 1909 H. N. Pharr, J. C. Kelly, John C. Conway, and A. W. Roth formed the Louisiana-Rio Grande (LRG) Canal Company to transform about 40,000 acres of arid land in Hidalgo County into productive farmland. To do this the company built two pumping stations to divert water from the Rio Grande through an elaborate irrigation system to a planned community of small farmsteads. The agricultural success of the LRG Canal Company, its successor the Hidalgo County Water Improvement District #2, and other similar operations in the region resulted in an influx of Anglo farmers and settlers from the midwestern U.S. into this mainly Hispanic region of Texas. The bountiful harvests propelled the Rio Grande Valley to the forefront of Texas agriculture by the mid-20th century and earned the region a reputation as the "Winter Garden" of Texas. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge — 4.2 mi
  About 2,000 acres of river forest on the Rio Grande's north bank, the surviving part of Benigno Leal's 1834 land grant, kept as a refuge since 1943 where two bird migration routes meet.
• La Lomita Chapel — 9.2 mi
  A small sandstone chapel on the Rio Grande levee, built by Oblate missionaries in 1865 and rebuilt at this site in 1899, the landmark that gave the city of Mission its name.
• Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park — 13 mi
  A 587-acre stand of Rio Grande woodland near Mission, once part of a Spanish porción, given to the state by the Bentsen family in 1944 and now headquarters of the World Birding Center.
• Museum of South Texas History — 15 mi
  Edinburg's regional museum, begun in 1967 in the 1910 Hidalgo County jail and now telling the Rio Grande's story from fossils and native peoples through steamboats to the 20th century.

More markers nearby

• Jackson Ranch Church — 1.1 mi
• Hidalgo-Reynosa Bridges — 4.2 mi
• Quinta Mazatlan_Home of Jason Matthews — 6.2 mi
• Floyd H. (Slats) Rodgers — 6.7 mi