Ward Island

The island's second school came right after the first. In April 1947 the Baptist General Convention of Texas chartered a college, which became the University of Corpus Christi that September. It opened at Cuddihy Field with 312 students, leased the Navy's island for a dollar a year in November, and moved classes there in January 1948. For twenty-six years it was the city's only four-year degree-granting school. Hurricane Celia in 1970 damaged the wartime buildings, and in 1973 the island passed to the new Corpus Christi campus of Texas A&I University, which became Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

What the plaque says

Ward Island Originally called Island 'A', this 258 acre peninsula was later named for land developer John C. Ward who obtained the island in 1892. Plans to develop the island into an exclusive resort community were crushed by a depression in 1893, but Ward Island became a popular hunting and fishing site. W.E. James and Herman Anderson purchased the land in 1909. Tourist businesses remained here until the 1940s. During World War II, Ward Island was acquired by the U.S. Navy for the establishment of a radar station and training base. Commissioned in July 1942, the base provided advanced training to Navy, Marine, Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Air Force personnel. In 1943 the facility was renamed Naval Air Technical Training Center and included 67 main buildings such as barracks, classrooms, and administration building, mess hall, library, and chapel. For more than three years this base operated as the Navy's only aviation electronic training school, graduating more than 10,000 technicians. Declared surplus by the Navy, the base was closed in October 1947. That year it became the site of the University of Corpus Christi, which later developed into Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mirador de la Flor — 7.0 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.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 7.9 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.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 8.0 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 — 8.1 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.

More markers nearby

• WWII Meeting of Presidents Camacho and Roosevelt — steps away
• Karankawa People — 1.0 mi
• Rabbi Sidney A. Wolf — 3.0 mi
• General W.W. Sterling — 3.0 mi