Rio Vista Farm

Rio Vista sat in a farming valley that Elephant Butte Dam had just remade. After 1916 steady water turned Socorro's family farms, vineyards and orchards into large cotton and alfalfa estates worked with machinery, and by 1920 cotton rivaled copper as the area's chief industry. Socorro had 2,123 people in the mid-1930s but only 350 by 1941, and it stayed small for decades. It later grew fast, reaching 22,995 by 1990, through colonias that lacked paved streets, water and sewer lines.

What the plaque says

Rio Vista Farm El Paso County's second poor farm, known as the El Paso Poor Farm, was established here in 1915. John O'Shea, a wealthy farmer and businessman whose farm was nearby, assumed operation of the farm. His wife, Agnes O'Shea, was in charge of the residents. John O'Shea died in 1929, and the couple's daughter, Helen O'Shea Keleher, came from her home in San Antonio to operate the farm with her mother. The farm was scheduled to be closed in 1929, but, with the troubled times of the Depression era, its population grew. Renamed "Rio Vista Farm," the poor farm hosted a variety of public welfare programs beginning in the 1930s. It operated under the Texas Transient Bureau and later the federal Works Progress Administration. A temporary base for a Civilian Conservation Corps unit in 1936, the farm continued to shelter hundreds of homeless and destitute adults and children. From 1951 to 1964, the farm was used as a reception and processing center for the Bracero program, which brought Mexican laborers to work in the lower valley of El Paso and other agricultural areas in the U.S. New federal welfare programs and state law reduced the population of the poor farm to four, and it was closed in 1964. Unlike other Texas county poor farms, Rio Vista followed a familial rather than institutional model, accepting neglected and abandoned children in addition to the adult indigent population. In later life, Helen O'Shea Keleher cited the fifty years she spent with the more than four thousand orphans and neglected children of the Rio Vista Poor Farm as her proudest accomplishment. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Socorro Mission (Nuestra Senora de la Limpia Concepcion del Socorro) — 2.2 mi
  Socorro's adobe church on the El Paso Mission Trail, with walls five feet thick, carved vigas from an older church and a statue of Saint Michael said to have chosen the town.
• Tigua Indian Cultural Center, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo — 3.5 mi
  The cultural center of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, the Tigua nation that has lived in the Mission Valley of El Paso since 1682 and keeps its own history here.
• Ysleta Mission (Corpus Christi de la Ysleta del Sur) — 4.2 mi
  The Tigua mission church at Ysleta, rebuilt in 1908 around the walls, bell and Santo Entierro that came through fire, its interior painted with rain clouds and corn.
• San Elizario Historic District — 5.3 mi
  A plaza of adobe buildings at the end of the El Paso Mission Trail: an 1877 chapel, Gregorio Garcia's portaled house and the old county jail of Billy the Kid legend.

More markers nearby

• Early Site of Socorro Mission — 2.1 mi
• Socorro — 2.2 mi
• Socorro Mission La Purísima — 2.2 mi
• The Camino Real — 2.2 mi