Raymond and Tirza Martin High School

Raymond Martin reached Laredo in 1854 after stops in New Orleans, Pensacola and San Antonio, and opened a small store south of San Agustín Church. Loans secured by property did the rest: when borrowers defaulted he foreclosed, and by century's end his land was estimated at 130,000 acres. He led the Botas faction and, though he stayed out of the 1886 riot, helped fold both parties into the Independent Club. His son Albert became mayor in 1926, and his grandson Pepe held the office from 1954 to 1978.

What the plaque says

Raymond and Tirza Martin High School In the 1930s, Laredo's growing scholastic population dictated the need for a new high school, as students outgrew the campus built on Zaragoza Street twenty years before. Superintendent William Patrick Galligan oversaw construction of a new high school at this site on land previously donated as a public park by Laredo mayor and Webb county judge Samuel M. Jarvis. Funding for the $353,000 school came through a bond election and partnership with the Public Works Administration, a federal agency. The school board named the facility for Raymond Martin, a french immigrant who settled in Laredo in the 1850s and prospered as a landowner, businessman and political leader, and his wife, Tirza (Garcia), member of a prominent local family. The couple had ten children, and at the time of the school's construction, son Albert was mayor of Laredo and son Joe was school board president. Designed by architects Giesecke and Harris of Austin, with associate architects Trout & Leyendecker of Laredo, the building exhibits classical revival and art deco styling. Architectural features of the massive l-shaped floor plan include local face brick and cast stone trim and details. Interior space provided for classrooms administrative offices, a cafeteria, a combination 1000-seat maple floor gymnasium and auditorium, and capacity for 1600 students. Construction began in August 1935, and the school opened in March 1937. This was Laredo's only high school campus until Nixon High opened in 1964. Over the years, graduates of Martin High School have distinguished themselves as scholars, professionals, athletes, artists, civic leaders and valued citizens. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Agustín Cathedral — 1.0 mi
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• San Agustín Plaza — 1.1 mi
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — 1.1 mi
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — 1.2 mi
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.

More markers nearby

• Bruni Plaza — 0.6 mi
• Jarvis Plaza — 0.8 mi
• Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church — 0.8 mi
• El Primer Congreso Mexicanista — 0.8 mi