Museum of the Coastal Bend

The Museum of the Coastal Bend opened on October 11, 2003, built by Victoria College with advisors and volunteers from the surrounding towns, and its permanent exhibit runs the whole span of people on this coast. It starts with Clovis hunters of mammoths 13,000 years ago and the atlatl, then the rise of coastal life after the sea reached its present level about 3,000 years ago, and the pottery known as Rockport ware, made from about 1250 by the likely ancestors of the Karankawa peoples. The Karankawa, Aranama and Tamique left no written records, so what is known of them comes from archaeology and from what European colonists wrote down.

Then the French. La Salle sailed in 1684 with four ships and about 400 people, missed the Mississippi, and landed on this coast in 1685; the supply ship sank, and the first trouble with the Karankawa came when the colonists took canoes and goods the Karankawa had salvaged. The site of his Fort St. Louis was lost until 1996, when eight iron cannons were found buried on the Keeran Ranch in southern Victoria County. The museum tells what that dig revealed about the colonists, their dealings with Native people and their struggle to survive; the ship La Belle itself is told at the Bullock in Austin.

The Borchers Leon exhibit hall is given to ranching, and a public archaeology lab opens to visitors two days a week.