Nuecestown Raid

The raid ended at Nuecestown; the killing did not. A Corpus Christi company led by the merchant John Swanks charged the raiders and Swanks was shot dead, and a raider Noakes had wounded was hanged by a mob after four days in custody. Then white vigilance committees, some called minute companies, killed dozens of Mexican Texans, drove families off their land and burned their homes. The state sent Rangers, who stopped the vigilantes but killed Mexican Texans themselves. No one has an exact toll.

What the plaque says

Nuecestown Raid During the reconstruction era in Texas, tensions mounted between Anglo settlers and Mexicans in the Nueces River area. On March 26, 1875, a band of raiders attacked a farm near Nuecestown, stealing livestock and taking some of the settlers prisoner. Forcing their captives to March on foot, they proceeded to Nuecestown. Thomas and Mary Noakes, owners of a general store near this site, were conducting business when the party of raiders arrived. During an attack on the store a customer, John Smith, was shot and seriously wounded. Noakes, who had built trenches under his building for defense purposes, took refuge there after shooting one of the raiders. Mary Noakes, attempting to defend her children and home, was confronted by armed intruders in the store, but was able to help her children escape to the nearby river. Although the family escaped unhurt, the Noakes store was burned. The Nuecestown raid resulted in increased hostilities between Mexican and Anglo settlers of the area. In the following months many innocent Mexicans were slain in retaliatory actions by angry Anglos. It took a special contingent of Texas rangers to finally restore peace and order to the Nueces strip. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Aquarium — 13 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 — 13 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.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 13 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 — 13 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

• Nuecestown Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Hilltop Tuberculosis Sanitorium — 0.6 mi
• Calallen — 2.2 mi
• Bethel Baptist Church of Christ and Cemetery — 5.2 mi