Site of Santa Petronila Ranch

Garza Falcón came to the Nueces late in a long frontier career. Born in 1712 at Real de las Salinas, Nuevo León, he was a captain at the Cerralvo presidio by 1734. In 1747 José de Escandón chose him to explore the south bank of the Rio Grande, and in 1749 he brought forty families from Nuevo León to found Camargo, where he served as captain and chief justice. He set up the Carnestolendas ranch, near today's Rio Grande City, in 1752. He died at Camargo in 1767 and was buried in his private chapel.

What the plaque says

Site of Santa Petronila Ranch Appointed in 1764 by the governor of the Spanish colony of Nuevo Santander, Captain Blas Maria de la Garza Falcon (1712-1767) established an outpost and way station (8 miles east), the first in present-day Nueces County. He was commissioned to explore the coast and establish a mission for Christianizing the Indians. By 1766 he had moved his family, friends and herds of livestock to what was called Rancho de Don Blas or Santa Petronila Ranch. Until 1836 many colonists came from the Rio Grande area. The ranch served as headquarters for expeditions including those led by Falcon and his son Alferez Don Joseph Antonio de la Garza who explored the islands along the Gulf Coast. Falcon probably named Santa Gertrudis Creek after his only daughter, Gertrudis de la Garza. He played an important role in settling towns along the Rio Grande and Nueces River and Padre, Mustang and St. Joseph's Islands. Soldiers at the garrison patrolled the region against the fierce Karankawa Indians and foreign invasion. Many colonists returned to the Rio Grande settlements because of Indian raids and the Texas War for Independence (1836). After the war they reestablished homes here. Many of their descendants still live in the area. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• King Ranch Visitor Center — 14 mi
  The bus-tour gate to a working ranch of about 825,000 acres, founded on Santa Gertrudis Creek in 1853 and worked from the start by the Kineños, families from Cruillas in Tamaulipas.
• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 20 mi
  Five undeveloped acres on the Nueces named for the Lipan Apaches who camped here, where Mexico built an earth-and-rail fort that Texans took early in the Revolution.
• Mirador de la Flor — 23 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• Cattle Drives from South Texas — 5.5 mi
• St. Paul Lutheran Church and School — 7.0 mi
• St. John Lutheran Church — 7.1 mi
• Bishop — 7.1 mi