Taft Agricultural Industrial Complex

The plaque ends as the company fades; the town it built then had to find its own way. Taft incorporated in 1929 with Ben Ivey as mayor, a year after the company sold its last holdings. Oil found north of town in 1935 carried it through the Depression. In the 1930s local farmers turned to vegetables, and packing sheds rose along the railroad, working until the last one came down in the 1950s. Grain elevators took over, serving growers of sorghum, cotton and some corn. After World War II Taft had a housing boom while its retail trade declined.

What the plaque says

Taft Agricultural Industrial Complex The Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company laid out the town of Taft on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad line in 1900. The intention of the company directors was to present Taft and surrounding farms as a model community to attract Northern investors. By 1904 a post office and a company commissary had opened near the rail line, and soon other businesses and homes were built nearby. To promote the area's economic possibilities and the ease with which potential farmers and ranchers could market their products, the company planned a large agricultural industrial complex in the center of town. By 1909 they had built a slaughter and packing house, a cold storage facility and ice plant, and a cottonseed oil mill. By 1921, the complex also included two cotton gins, a feed mill, cotton compress, creamery and ice cream factory, and machine shop. As the company plan came to fruition, settlement and land values increased and the company realized a profit as it began selling off all of its holdings. Once solely a company town, Taft soon became diversified as the company presence gradually disappeared. Some of the industrial complex facilities remained in operation under private ownership until the 1950s. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 11 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 — 11 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 — 12 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 — 13 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

• President William Howard Taft Visits Taft — steps away
• Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company — 0.3 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Taft — 0.4 mi
• Gregory — 7.6 mi