Rancho de Santa Maria

The grant behind this ranch belonged to a woman. Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí, a widow by the time the grant was approved, inherited her husband's twelve-league share of the La Feria tract. She ran it from her headquarters at La Florida in what is now Cameron County, doubled the property, and added other grants in the names of her brother and sons. Known as La Patrona, she built a family chapel and endowed churches in Reynosa, Camargo and Matamoros. When she died in 1803 she owned more than a million acres across the lower valley.

What the plaque says

Rancho de Santa Maria Part of Spain's 1777 La Feria Grant (12.5 leagues), partitioned into 6 units 1843. Here in 1850's was a sub-post of Fort Brown (28 mi. SE) and Fort Ringgold (65 mi. NW). This was proposed site in 1860's for "Homeville", this locality's first small-acreage promotion. Present compound, built 1870 by L.J. Hynes, has buildings for dairy, kitchen, ammunition. Hynes, first Postmaster (1876), had stage depot, general store, telegraph office, shipping wharf on river. Chapel was built 1880. In 1892, Frank Rabb bought the ranch. In 1916 border troubles, U.S. Army established headquarters here. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  About 2,000 acres of river forest on the Rio Grande's north bank, the surviving part of Benigno Leal's 1834 land grant, kept as a refuge since 1943 where two bird migration routes meet.
• Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park — 22 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 — 24 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.
• Museum of South Texas History — 26 mi
  Edinburg's regional museum, begun in 1967 in the 1910 Hidalgo County jail and now telling the Rio Grande's story from fossils and native peoples through steamboats to the 20th century.

More markers nearby

• Battle of La Bolsa — 2.1 mi
• Near Route of Alonso de Leon Expeditions — 3.3 mi
• The Spot Where "American Blood was Shed on American Soil" — 3.3 mi
• El Horcon Tract and Rio Rico — 3.5 mi