Port Isabel (Old Point Isabel)

The line to Point Isabel was built by one Brownsville man against the steamboat owners. Simón Celaya organized the Rio Grande Railroad in 1870, and a 22.5-mile narrow-gauge line opened on July 4, 1872. Its 42-inch gauge was unique in Texas. Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, whose steamboats it threatened, held an unbuilt 1866 charter and went to court to stop Celaya, but failed. The locomotives burned mesquite, and the track needed fifteen bridges, including a trestle over 15,000 feet long. In January 1891 bandits wrecked the train and took $60,000 in Mexican silver.

What the plaque says

Port Isabel (Old Point Isabel) Site of a ranch settlement, owned by Don Rafael Garcia, called "El Fronton de Santa Ysabel" (Bluff of Saint Isabel) about the year 1828. The Mexican custom station was located here in 1844, after the villages of Brazos Santiago and Boca Del Rio were swept away by storms. Goods landed here were at once freighted inland to Matamoros. After the Mexican War (1846-1848), the United States Post Office of "Point Isabel" was created on April 9, 1849. Efforts to build a railroad line to Brownsville in the 1850s did not succeed, but after the Civil War, in 1866, public demands for a rail line to Brownsville were met by Rio Grande steamboat interests, who chartered but refrained from building the road. In 1871, competitors formed the Rio Grande Railroad Company, obtained a charter, and put the line into service in 1873 from Brownsville to a terminus here (450 feet south of this marker). The line served until 1933 when a deep water channel was built to Brownsville. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Port Isabel Lighthouse State Historic Site — steps away
  A 72-foot brick tower finished in 1852 for the Brazos Santiago shipping lane, dark from 1905 until a reproduction lens was lit in 2022, and the only Texas lighthouse open to the public.
• Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge — 14 mi
  A coastal refuge set up in 1946 for wintering redhead ducks, with 417 bird species recorded and, by the Fish and Wildlife Service's account, the largest ocelot population in the United States.
• Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park — 18 mi
  A flat coastal prairie north of Brownsville where Taylor's army and Arista's Army of the North fought the first major battle of the Mexican War on May 8, 1846, now interpreted from both sides.
• Stillman House Museum — 22 mi
  The 1850 Greek Revival house of Charles Stillman, who laid out Brownsville in 1848 beside the army's Fort Brown, and for a century the home of the Treviño family.

More markers nearby

• Port of Matamoros — steps away
• Point Isabel, C.S.A. — steps away
• Queen Isabel Inn — steps away
• Charles Champion — steps away