Port of Brownsville

The Handbook calls Louis Cobolini the father of the port, and he got there by an unlikely road. Born in Trieste in 1845, he fought under Garibaldi, could not go home, and became a Galveston fisherman, a Knights of Labor officer and a lecturer on labor and seaports. He moved his fishing business to Port Isabel in 1907. By 1910, as secretary of Brownsville's Chamber of Commerce, he argued for a channel deep enough for thirty-foot ships. He died of pneumonia on February 27, 1928, after guiding army engineers over the route, and Congress approved the port that year.

What the plaque says

Port of Brownsville The first serious attempt to study the possibility of construction of a deep water seaport in this part of South Texas was undertaken in 1854 when a survey was conducted by United States Army engineers. At that time, the only natural harbor in the area was located at Brazos de Santiago Pass near Point Isabel (16 mi. NE). Shipping through that pass dated to the 16th Century, but the presence of shifting sandbars prevented large vessels from anchoring at that point. In 1906 Louis Cabolini, a commercial fisherman in Point Isabel, took on the cause for a deep water port. He compiled data that convinced U.S. Army engineers that such an undertaking was practical and deserved federal economic support. During the next 20 years, various attempts at dredging channels and eliminating the sandbars were made without much success. Recognizing the need for deep water transportation to assure sound economic growth, the citizens of Brownsville created a navigation district in 1929 to provide local support for the Federal Government to build a deep water port. Between 1934 and 1936, this ship channel, linking Brownsville and the Gulf of Mexico, was dredged. The port facilities were formally dedicated in May 1936. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park — 5.7 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 — 6.3 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.
• Port Isabel Lighthouse State Historic Site — 15 mi
  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 — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Pan American Airways Blind Flying School — 3.3 mi
• Cameron County — 5.9 mi
• Cameron County — 6.2 mi
• Fort Brown Reservation — 6.2 mi