Pat Dunn Ranch

How cattle left the island is the part the plaque skips. Dunn dug wooden-framed wells, as many as seventy-five of them across the island, and ran two roundups a year, in May and October, each lasting three weeks to a month. Market cattle were driven across the shallow Laguna Madre near where the JFK Causeway now stands. The Intracoastal Waterway of the 1940s ended that crossing, so herds went north to Mustang Island and were ferried to the mainland. After the causeway opened in 1951, trucks could load at the line camps.

What the plaque says

Pat Dunn Ranch Patrick Francis Dunn, the son of Irish immigrants Thomas and Catherine H. Dunn, was born October 10, 1858, in Corpus Christi. He married Clara J. Jones August 30, 1883. In December 1883, Pat Dunn entered a partnership with his mother and brother, Thomas, to graze cattle on Padre Island, and as manager moved to the island in January 1884. Settling 20 miles down the coast. Laguna Madre and the Gulf of Mexico served as natural fences; during roundup, ranch hands drove stock into several corrals scattered along the 110-mile island. When his children reached school age, Dunn moved back to Corpus Christi and established headquarters at the north end of the island. In 1907, after buying his brother's interest, he built a 2-story house on Corpus Christi Pass (0.5 mile east), using lumber washed ashore from shipwrecks. Much of the house and corrals were constructed of fine mahogany. The house was destroyed in the hurricane of 1916, the year of his mother's death, which left Dunn as sole owner of the ranch. Pat Dunn sold his Padre Island interests in 1926, retaining grazing rights, which he used until his death March 25, 1937. His son, Burton Dunn, continued ranching operations until his death Sept. 8, 1970, after which the last cattle were removed from Padre Island. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mustang Island State Park — 4.2 mi
  More than five miles of Gulf beach on a barrier island named for wild horses, with beach camping on the sand and a twenty-mile paddling trail on the bay side.
• Padre Island National Seashore — 15 mi
  About sixty-six miles of undeveloped barrier beach south of Corpus Christi, where more Kemp's ridley sea turtles nest than anywhere else in the United States.
• Mirador de la Flor — 16 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Padre Island and Padre Nicolas Balli — 2.6 mi
• German POW Camp at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi — 4.8 mi
• Naval Air Station Corpus Christi — 4.8 mi
• Flour Bluff — 4.8 mi