Run

Andrew Champion, a former Texas Ranger, kept the store at Run, a jacal of whitewashed adobe with a thatched roof and a packed-earth floor. The Handbook of Texas says customers paid in United States or Mexican money at a rate of two to one. Bandits robbed the store at gunpoint in 1915. That year the American consul at Matamoros listed Mexicans killed in the Valley, among them fourteen near Donna in September and thirty at Alamo in August. The list names none of them, and the numbers rest on that list alone.

What the plaque says

Run This area in the mid-1800s was part of the Asadores Ranch owned by Salvador and San Juana Cavazos. In 1898, east Texas rice farmers A.F. Hester, Sr. and T.J. Hooks bought land in the vicinity. They and others began La Blanca Agricultural Company and the Arroyo Canal Company to build an irrigation system. They also helped usher the railroad into the area. Ed and George Ruthven moved to the area by 1904. Ed established a store and was postmaster for the community of Run (a contraction of his surname), and George built irrigation pumps. Andrew Champion also owned a general store. A school opened in 1905, but many area residents began moving to Donna following a devastating flood four years later. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge — 4.3 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.
• Museum of South Texas History — 17 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.
• La Lomita Chapel — 17 mi
  A small sandstone chapel on the Rio Grande levee, built by Oblate missionaries in 1865 and rebuilt at this site in 1899, the landmark that gave the city of Mission its name.
• Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park — 21 mi
  A 587-acre stand of Rio Grande woodland near Mission, once part of a Spanish porción, given to the state by the Bentsen family in 1944 and now headquarters of the World Birding Center.

More markers nearby

• Donna Public Schools — 0.3 mi
• Cpl. Harlon Block, USMC — 6.1 mi
• Donna — 6.5 mi
• Progreso — 6.8 mi