The Ramón Family

The Ramón name runs through the Benavides story. The Handbook of Texas gives Margarita Ramón as the wife of José Jesús Benavides and the mother of Refugio and Santos, the Laredo mayor and the Confederate colonel. Their half-brother Cristóbal's mother was Tomasa Cameros. Santos's early rise came through his uncle Basilio Benavides, three times alcalde under Mexican rule and later mayor and state representative. Martín Ramón, whom the plaque places beside his Benavides cousins in the Confederate cavalry, thus served under a colonel who was a Ramón on his mother's side.

What the plaque says

The Ramón Family The Ramón Family Engaged in much of Laredo's early history, the Ramón family occupied residential property at this site by 1869. Patriarch of the family was Ildefonso Ramón, who was in the Laredo area by 1800 and served as Alcalde for several terms. His son, José María Ramón, followed his father's political career, serving as Alcalde during periods of tension along the border as the result of disputes over the boundary and the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. The third-generation family member to live in Laredo was Martín Ramón, who took over the family's ranching interests and served in the Confederate Cavalry with his noted cousins, the Benavides brothers, in defense of the Laredo area. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Agustín Cathedral — steps away
  Laredo's Gothic Revival parish church, finished in 1872 on a parish older than Texas statehood, and the mother church of the Diocese of Laredo since 2000.
• San Agustín Plaza — steps away
  The shaded square at the center of Laredo's 1755 town, where Carrizo families, Spanish ranchers and a century of border politics shared the same ground.
• Republic of the Rio Grande Museum — steps away
  A stone-and-adobe Laredo house, by tradition the capitol of a federalist republic that lasted ten months in 1840, now a museum of life in a mid-nineteenth-century home.
• Fort McIntosh Historic District at Laredo College — 1.1 mi
  An 1849 Army post on the Rio Grande above Laredo, its barracks, officers' quarters and 1895 chapel still standing on a college campus that took over the site in 1947.

More markers nearby

• Laredo Election Riot, 1886 — steps away
• Benavides Brothers — steps away
• Republic of the Rio Grande — steps away
• City Hall and Market House — steps away