Half Moon Reef Lighthouse and Linnville

Port Lavaca was founded by people who had lost a town. In March 1840 San Antonio officials tried to hold Penateka Comanche leaders hostage at peace talks in the Council House, and about thirty-five Penateka men, women and children were killed; to the Comanches, envoys were not to be touched. That August Buffalo Hump led the largest of the southern Comanche raids, perhaps 1,000 people with families, Kiowa allies and Mexican guides, down the Guadalupe. They struck Victoria on August 6 and on August 8 surprised Linnville, 3.5 miles up the bay from here. The townspeople fled to boats and watched for a day as warehouses holding about $300,000 in goods were plundered and burned. Twenty-three settlers died in the raid, eight of them Black and one Mexican.

The Handbook of Texas notes evidence that the raid also served Mexican Centralists, who wanted to punish Victoria and Linnville for giving the Federalists' short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande a port; the captured horses and plunder appear to have reached Centralist generals Valentín Canalizo and Adrián Woll. Linnville never recovered. Thomas McConnell, who had lost his Victoria home in the raid, bought land on this bluff from Isidro Benavides of De León's colony, and La Vaca, the cow, was named in 1841 and laid out by 1842. It became the busiest port on the bay during the Republic.

The lighthouse in the park, an 1858 hexagonal light brought ashore from Half Moon Reef, is the only one of the Texas coast's screw-pile lights still standing.