St. Paul

The plaque credits George H. Paul as the developer; St. Paul was one stop in a long selling career. Born on an Iowa farm in 1877, he sold Canadian land to Midwestern farmers before reaching Corpus Christi in January 1907. That spring he began Tuesday excursion trains from Iowa and Nebraska, sold Driscoll Ranch land and founded Robstown. By 1908 his company had as many as 1,000 agents, and he took 56,000 acres from the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company to sell on the same pay-as-sold terms he later got from Welder. He died in severe poverty in 1965.

What the plaque says

St. Paul The town of St. Paul began in 1910, the result of a land promotion operation by developer George H. Paul and the Shary Land Company. George Paul purchased 70,000 acres of land from local rancher J.J. Welder and divided the acreage into farm lots. The townsite of St. Paul was platted in December 1910, and Adolph, Robert, and John Shary formed the Shary Land Company to promote the new town. Agents representing the development team worked throughout the midwest to publicize the new community and excursion trains departed Kansas City twice a month bringing prospective settlers to Texas. The town grew quickly, with the construction of homes, the three story shary hotel, retail stores, schools, and churches. The George H. Paul company operated a huge company farm that employed as many as 300 workers, as well as the largest store in town, the George H. Paul farm store, which also housed a post office (established in 1910), telephone exchange, and a bank. By the 1920's prosperous cotton gins were in operation to process farmers crops, and eight trains a day came through the busy St. Paul Depot. The town declined after World War II as many people moved to larger cities. 1994

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lipantitlán State Historic Site — 19 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.
• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 20 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.
• Texas State Aquarium — 22 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 — 22 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

• Plymouth Oil Company and Plymouth Oilers — 4.9 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Sinton — 4.9 mi
• Papalote Creek — 5.2 mi
• West Sinton Community — 8.7 mi