The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation System

The canals that made Mercedes also mark a killing. On July 23 or 24, 1915, brothers Lorenzo and Gorgonio Manríquez were shot dead there. The lawyer Frank C. Pierce put Lorenzo near the headgate of the Mercedes Canal and Gorgonio in town. The Refusing to Forget project, drawing on Pierce, names Hidalgo County lawman Stokes Chaddick and a customs inspector, John White, as the shooters, who said the brothers resisted arrest. A labor contractor, Florencio Saenz, had named them as raiders. Pierce called it an execution and began listing the dead.

What the plaque says

The American Rio Grande Land and Irrigation System Land developer B. F. Yoakum saw agricultural potential along the Rio Grande and found investors in 1905 for an irrigation project. They purchased 250,000 acres and the townsite of Mercedes for business headquarters. The pump station began operating in 1908. The system had grown by 1920 to three large canals, miles of branches, and five pumping plants. In 1930 the Hidalgo and Cameron County Water Control and Improvement District took over the system which continues to serve the farming area of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge — 15 mi
  About 2,000 acres of river forest on the Rio Grande's north bank, the surviving part of Benigno Leal's 1834 land grant, kept as a refuge since 1943 where two bird migration routes meet.
• Museum of South Texas History — 19 mi
  Edinburg's regional museum, begun in 1967 in the 1910 Hidalgo County jail and now telling the Rio Grande's story from fossils and native peoples through steamboats to the 20th century.
• La Lomita Chapel — 26 mi
  A small sandstone chapel on the Rio Grande levee, built by Oblate missionaries in 1865 and rebuilt at this site in 1899, the landmark that gave the city of Mission its name.
• Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park — 29 mi
  A flat coastal prairie north of Brownsville where Taylor's army and Arista's Army of the North fought the first major battle of the Mexican War on May 8, 1846, now interpreted from both sides.

More markers nearby

• Mercedes Enterprise — steps away
• The Hidalgo County Bank and Trust Company — steps away
• Dr. Hector P. García — 0.2 mi
• Temple Beth Israel — 0.6 mi