Pleasanton, Carrizo Springs & the Winter Garden
Choke Canyon State Park, Chaparral WMA, the Longhorn Museum in Pleasanton, the Jourdanton and Carrizo Springs courthouses, Pearsall, Cotulla and Crystal City's camp.
This is brush country and irrigated Winter Garden between San Antonio and the Rio Grande, Coahuiltecan land where Paleo-Indian hunters crossed the Frio Valley more than 10,000 years ago. Choke Canyon State Park sits on a Frio River reservoir dedicated in 1982, and Chaparral Wildlife Management Area keeps 15,200 acres of the thornscrub that ringed the farms.
Ranching and the railroad came first. Pleasanton, where cowboys gathered for the Kansas drives, tells that story in the Longhorn Museum, and Jourdanton won the county seat in 1910 and built a Mission Revival courthouse. Pearsall's 1884 jail and Carrizo Springs' 1884 courthouse followed the rails. Artesian wells and the 1905 breakup of the Cross S Ranch made the Winter Garden: onions near Cotulla in 1896, then spinach at Crystal City.
The harder history sits in the same towns. Dimmit County's white primary shut out Mexican Americans from 1914, Cotulla ran segregated schools when Lyndon Johnson taught there in 1928, and Crystal City held Japanese, German and Italian families, U.S. citizens among them, and Latin American deportees in a family camp from 1942 to 1948. In 1963 and 1969-70 its Mexican American majority took the council and school board, a story told at My Story Museum in Crystal City.
What to See in Pleasanton, Carrizo Springs & the Winter Garden
9 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Architecture
Pleasanton, Carrizo Springs & the Winter Garden rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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