Palacios Pavilions

The pavilion was one piece of a resort plan. The townsite company built Hotel Palacios in 1903, the year Southern Pacific excursions began carrying prospective settlers from the Midwest, and the 1904 pavilion stood on a T-head pier beside it. In 1906 the first Baptist Young People's Union Encampment met at Hamilton Point. By 1915 the town had about 2,000 residents, more than 100 businesses, a weekly paper called the Beacon and four churches. A seawall went up in 1935, the year the first pavilion was replaced.

What the plaque says

Palacios Pavilions In 1903 the Palacios townsite company arranged with the Southern Pacific Railroad to extend its line to the new city. The first train arrived on June 29, bringing prospective settlers from Midwestern states. The company began construction of a pavilion on the South Bay in June 1904. Designed by Victoria Architect Jules Leffland, it was built on a pier extending 400 feet into the bay. Called the Pleasure Pavilion, it consisted of a central round two-story open-air pavilion with boat docks and bathers' dressing rooms extending along the pier. It quickly became the social center of the town, offering such activities as swimming, boating, dancing, skating, and basketball games. The Pleasure Pavilion sustained hurricane damage in 1915, 1919, and 1934. Under the direction of a local seawall commission and with funding from the federal public works administration, it was razed in 1935 and replaced with a new pavilion, called the roundhouse. The roundhouse pavilion continued to be the focal point of community activities, especially during the war year of the 1940's and the early 1950's. It was destroyed by hurricane Carla in 1961, and eventually the city erected a smaller open-air pavilion in its place. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Indianola — 21 mi
  The site of Texas's second port, where Morgan's steamships, Army freight and the first refrigerated beef passed until the hurricanes of 1875 and 1886, now mostly under Matagorda Bay.
• Half Moon Reef Lighthouse and Linnville — 25 mi
  The last screw-pile lighthouse of the Texas coast, brought ashore at Port Lavaca, a town founded by refugees from Linnville, the port Buffalo Hump's Comanches burned in August 1840.

More markers nearby

• St. John's Episcopal Church — 0.2 mi
• Texas Baptist Encampment Grounds — 0.3 mi
• First Baptist Church of Palacios — 0.3 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Palacios — 0.4 mi