Nueces County

The river had more names than the county. A 1527 map labels it Río Escondido, the Hidden River, because its mouth lay behind a barrier island. Alonso de León, crossing it in 1689, called it Río de las Nueces for the pecans. Two years later Domingo Terán de los Ríos called it San Diego and Father Damián Massanet San Norberto. Not until 1747 did Joaquín de Orobio y Basterra tie the lower river to the stream crossed upstream by the Old San Antonio Road. Afterward it marked the line between Texas and Nuevo Santander.

What the plaque says

Nueces County Created April 18, 1846, Organized July 13, 1846 Named for the river which, in 1689, Alonso de Leon called the Nueces because of the many Pecan trees on its banks. Corpus Christi county seat

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Art Museum of South Texas — steps away
  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 — 0.2 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 — 0.5 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.
• Mirador de la Flor — 1.1 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

• Corpus Christi and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway — steps away
• Early History of Port of Corpus Christi — steps away
• Corpus Christi Longshoremen's Unions — 0.2 mi
• Jalufka-Govatos House — 0.4 mi