Site of Old Salt Mill

The salt came from sixty miles down the Laguna Madre, where wind pushed brine onto the shore and left sheets of salt that men cut like ice. About 150 men worked the deposits and boated the salt to Anderson's mill, which ground it fine for tables and coarse for curing hides and feeding cattle. Buyers hauled it as far as Oklahoma. Padre Island National Seashore dates the trade from at least the early 1850s to 1874, when a September hurricane broke up or buried the deposits.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Salt Mill One of the earliest industries in Corpus Christi was a mill erected at this site by Captain John Anderson (1813-1898), a Swedish-born seafarer who brought his family to Texas in 1852. Anderson built a house here in the 1850s, when this property was on the waterfront. The mill may have been constructed at that time, although some sources claim that it was not in operation until the 1870s. The wind-powered mill ground salt and corn and cut wood. Chunks of salt were gathered from the shores of Laguna Madre and salt water ponds in the summer and transported here by boat. Much of it was ground fine for table salt and shipped to distant markets. The coarse-grained salt was used in preserving meat and curing hides at the many packing plants that flourished along the Texas coast after the Civil War (1861-1865). The Anderson Mill supplied needed products to Corpus Christi citizens and provided employment for mill workers and freighters. In 1900 the Anderson family demolished the windmill and built a two story residence here. The structure was sold in 1911 to become part of the Nueces Hotel, completed in 1913. The old hotel was razed after it was damaged by hurricane Celia in 1970. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — steps away
  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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.9 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.
• Texas State Aquarium — 1.1 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.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 1.2 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.

More markers nearby

• 1966 Farm Workers Rally and March — steps away
• Gutzon Borglum and the Corpus Christi Bayfront — steps away
• 1941 Corpus Christi Seawall — steps away
• Artesian Park and Sulphur Well — steps away