Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

In the 1920s, city was in high cotton

The terrible loss of life and widespread destruction of the 1919 storm led the city to take action to protect itself. The breakwater was the first step, followed later by the seawall.
   In constructing the breakwater, a railroad trestle was built into the bay in the curved shape the breakwater would become. Granite rocks quarried near San Antonio were hauled to the end of the line, where a barge-mounted crane dropped the boulders to the bay floor. As the breakwater took shape, the rail lines were pulled up and the work backed its way toward town.
   The big event of the decade came seven years to the date that the city was hit by the 1919 storm. On Sept. 14, 1926, the Port of Corpus Christi was opened. This small city would become a gateway to international trade. Much of the state's agricultural products - and later oil - would move through this new port.
   The celebration on that hot September day was the biggest the city had ever seen. Excursion trains brought 25,000 visitors to double the city's population. Boat races, a beauty contest, and an historical pageant were held. The downtown was draped in bunting for a parade that wound its way from Leopard Street through the downtown area to Cargo Dock One. Three U.S. destroyers arrived for the port opening.
   This changed the city. Before the port opened, former Caller editor Eli Merriman wrote, you could shoot a cannon down Chaparral and not worry about hitting anyone. The year after the port opened, companies like the Travis Cottonseed Oil Mill, the Aransas Compress and the Port Compress built huge facilities. Corpus Christi was filled with cotton producers, cotton buyers, cotton brokers, cotton exporters.
   Things looking up
   One result of this boom was the need for office space. In 1926, Maston Nixon built the Nixon Building at Leopard and Broadway. The 12-story structure was filled with offices of cotton buyers. Building the Nixon led to the commercial conversion of the bluff, from the fine old mansions on "King's Row" to the city's first skyscrapers. When the 14-story Plaza Hotel went up two years later, it gave the city skyline twin towers.
   A derelict monument from the past went up in flames in 1927. The Alta Vista Hotel, built by Elihu Ropes in 1890 at Three-Mile Point, was destroyed by fire. A bucket brigade couldn't save it.
   The next month, on July 4, the Don Patricio Causeway was opened to traffic. Crossing the open troughs built on wood pilings cost motorists $3 for a round trip. This first causeway took Corpus Christians across the Laguna Madre to enjoy the surf and sand of Padre Island.
   Corpus Christi High School (which is now Miller) was built in 1928, at a cost of $320,916.
   Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, was brought here in 1928 to design a bayfront plan. Part of his design called for a huge statue of Christ, 32 feet high, standing in the water inside rock jetties, with arm uplifted to still the raging waters. His plan also called for a seawall, a boulevard and landscaped parks behind it.
   Corpus Christi's first radio station, KGFI, went on the air on April 26, 1929. It did not have a transmitting tower, but relied on wires strung between the twin skyscrapers on the bluff, the Nixon and the Plaza.
   It was in May, 1929, that Ben Garza was able to forge a compromise among competing Hispanic civil rights organizations to form the League of United Latin American Citizens. Garza was elected its first president.
   The city in the 1800s was the commercial headquarters of the South Texas cattle empire. Now it was cotton country. The port in 1929 led the nation in cotton tonnage, exceeding the great port of New Orleans. It was approaching 600,000 bales shipped out each year.
   During cotton-picking time in the fall, fields of white stretched to the South Texas horizon. Leopard Street on a Saturday would be packed with cotton pickers and their families. Corpus Christi at the end of the decade was a prosperous place, but hard times were just around the corner.
   This is the second of two columns.
  
  
  

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  © 2000 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.