Site of Bay View College

The plaque tells of the school's people; the Handbook of Texas fills in its standing. Thomas M. Clark bought the idle boom hotel, and for the first two years Portland's public-school pupils attended the college with the local school board's approval. A state charter of 1897 let it grant degrees. In 1903 tuition and board ran fifteen dollars a month. At its peak 164 boarders lived on campus, and more than 2,000 students passed through in twenty-three years. Townspeople used the chapel for services. What thinned enrollment before the 1916 storm was the spread of Texas public schools.

What the plaque says

Site of Bay View College An important school of the coastal region, founded for scattered South Texas ranch children, by Thomas M. (1856-1943) and Alice Yantis Clark (1857-1913), of the family that founded Texas Christian University. The Clarks utilized 2-story "Hotel Portland", opened 1891 but soon idled by national business recession. With Mrs. Mollie Allen Turner as associate, they opened Bay View College in Sept. 1894, teaching primary through junior college subjects. Mrs. Clark, who also managed "The Home" for boarders, taught painting; Clark, music and literary subjects. Recreation included riding (on student-owned horses), house parties at patron George Fulton's Rincon Ranch (12 miles northeast), and an annual San Jacinto Day sail on Corpus Christi Bay. The first Bachelor of Letters degrees were awarded to a class of three: Wallace Clark, Lucille Long, Ed Rachal. In time, a 2-story boys' dormitory, a gymnasium, and a 2-story chapel stood on campus. Students came from 70 Texas counties, 12 other states, and Mexico. Some Bay View graduates went on to senior colleges and entered professions, many remained in ranching. In 1916 , a hurricane destroyed most of the buildings. A day school session was held the next winter in the chapel, but the college formally closed in 1917. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 5.6 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.
• Texas State Aquarium — 5.8 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 6.0 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Mirador de la Flor — 6.6 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• Site of Indian Point Mass Grave of 1919 Hurricane Victims — 1.9 mi
• Reef Road — 2.1 mi
• Gregory — 4.1 mi
• Joseph French Green and La Quinta Mansion — 4.1 mi