Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, May 24, 2000

The shoreline of history

A strip of land juts between Corpus Christi and Nueces Bays. It was once called Rincon. Later, this peninsula was called Brooklyn and later still North Beach. The official name now is Corpus Christi Beach, although many still call it North Beach.
   Henry L. Kinney, founder of Corpus Christi, had a mustang pen on the Rincon. He slaughtered horses for their hides. One day in the 1840s Kinney's wranglers hid in a mesquite thicket when they saw Comanches coming. As they watched, the warriors threw buffalo robes into the shallow end of the bayou so their horses wouldn't bog down in the mud.
   This was the area where Zachary Taylor's troops landed in the summer of 1845 and set up their tents that stretched for miles, from North Beach to where Taylor Street meets the bay.
   A few years after the army left, Kinney built a beef packing house on the Rincon, but it soon went broke. Twenty years later, a large beef packing house was located on the salt flats on the Rincon. Hall's Packery was built by John Hall, a former Union soldier and immigrant from England. The inlet leading to his packery, Hall's Bayou, was a favorite crabbing hole for boys who lived across the bayou in Irishtown. Hall's Bayou is where the ship channel is today.
   Between the north end at Rincon Point and Indian Point, across the bay, was the reef road, a raised oyster bed that divided Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi Bay. The reef provided an underwater bridge, which the Indians had long used to cross the bay. Nueces County for decades maintained signposts in the water showing where it zig-zagged. If a driver tried to take a short cut, he ran the risk of drowning his horses. An item in a March, 1896, Caller noted: "R.K. Reed of Portland visits Corpus Christi and reports that a wagon belonging to D.C. Rachal is stuck in the reef, the driver taking the wrong side of the stakes in crossing Nueces Bay. . ."
   In the Gay Nineties, when Corpus Christi was in a fever caused by the "Ropes Boom," local people put up money to build a resort hotel on North Beach, which was called Brooklyn then. The Miramar Hotel opened in May, 1891; three months later it burned to the ground.
   In 1895, heavyweight champion "Blacksmith'' Bob Fitzsimmons opened a camp on North Beach to train for his fight with "Gentleman'' Jim Corbett. The Caller reported that, "Fitzsimmons extends an invitation to any citizen who may wish to spar with him to come up to his training camp on North Beach . . . He will not hurt them, but they are welcome to pound him as much as they like. He spars with members of his party, alternating with them as their wind plays out.'' (One who took up the challenge was Walter Timon, who became county judge. Timon Boulevard on North Beach was named for him.)
   Fitzsimmons' pet lion was allowed to roam unrestrained on North Beach. The next year, the Caller reported that, "Bob Fitzsimmons and his pet lion got tangled in electric wires last week in Chicago. Result - a dead lion and a badly knocked out pugilist.''
   After the Spanish-American War, there was a great naval show on Nueces Bay that re-enacted the destruction of the Spanish fleet at Santiago. People came from all over the state to watch the spectacle from North Beach.
   Beginning in 1905, and lasting for a decade, North Beach was the site each August of a summer encampment called Epworth-By-The-Sea. Hundreds of Methodist families - including missionaries from around the world - arrived each year to attend religious services and have fun on the beach. The north end of North Beach also hosted the first airplane flights in this area when the Wright Brothers' company gave demonstration flights on July 3 and July 4, 1911.
   But the most momentous event in the history of this peninsula happened on Sept. 14, 1919, when the storm surge of this area's worst hurricane in history swept across North Beach. On the Monday morning after the storm, only three of hundreds of structures remained - the McDonald home, the first Spohn Hospital, and the Beach Hotel, which had been converted into an Army convalescent hospital. (It became a hotel again later, called the Breakers). One of the many sad stories of that tragedy was that some of the hundreds of victims were wounded soldiers who had survived the horrors of World War I only to be killed in a hurricane at Corpus Christi.
   (This is the first in a three-part series exploring the history of a stretch of shoreline from Rincon Point, on North Beach, to Three-Mile Point on Ocean Drive. Part two will appear in this space next Wednesday.)
  

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