The Railroad in Bee County

The railroad was bought as much as built. Bee County citizens raised a bonus of $52,660 for the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, while Corpus Christi gave $102,950. The company, promoted by Uriah Lott, was chartered on August 28, 1884, entered receivership on July 14, 1890, and was reorganized on June 16, 1892, the year the Southern Pacific acquired it. The county's second railroad, from Victoria, arrived in 1888 by the Handbook's count, a year before the plaque's date. The line the county paid for changed hands within six years of its arrival.

What the plaque says

The Railroad in Bee County On June 14, 1886, the first San Antonio and Aransas Pass (SA&AP) train arrived in Beeville to a cheering crowd. The arrival marked the combined efforts of SA&AP president Uriah Lott; Beeville merchant, banker and cattleman Captain A. C. Jones; and rancher Frank Skidmore to route the railroad through Bee County. When Lott's proposed line from San Antonio to the Gulf at Corpus Christi was opposed by the nearby town of Goliad, Jones granted land and substantial funds, while Skidmore donated land and the Skidmore townsite. Many others followed their example. Transformed from a village to a boom town, and surrounded by new farming towns, Beeville became a shipping point for cattle and cotton. In 1889, after the Southern Pacific completed a second line through here to Victoria and the port of Galveston, Bee County became a rail center with connections far and wide for passenger and freight service. Passenger service peaked in 1918, and by 1930 the Beeville-Skidmore line averaged 18 trains daily. During World War II passenger service increased, but improved highway travel led to its end in 1952. The Southern Pacific depot was razed in 1958, and the last train left Bee County in 1994, but the booster spirit of the railroad era lives on. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 25 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.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 28 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Presidio La Bahía — 28 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 28 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Commercial National Bank — steps away
• Beeville on the Poesta — steps away
• Barnard Elliott Bee, Sr. — steps away
• James Lincoln de la Mothe Borglum — steps away