Spanish frontier families once inhabited crossing area

David Adame/Caller-Times

A marker from the Texas Historical Commission marks the Santa Margarita Crossing area on Farm-to-Market Road 666 near the Nueces River Bridge.

   Motorists on Farm-to-Market Road 666 whiz past the Santa Margarita Crossing marker near a bridge on the Nueces River.
   But few know that the river crossing once shared its name, Santa Margarita, with a nearby settlement once occupied by Spanish frontier families.
   The settlement now is the subject of extensive study by an archaeological team that is spending this summer mapping this never-before studied site located south of San Patricio.
   "Who exactly lived there? We don't know," said Robert P. Drolet, a Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History archaeologist leading this collaborative study between the museum and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.
   "What we do know is that the people of Santa Margarita were frontier families migrating north when Spain controlled this area, before it became a part of Mexico," he said.
   "But because it wasn't an official Spanish town or villa, there's no official documentation of who these colony families were."
   While the river crossing's name still appears on maps and references to the settlement are found in historical documents, Drolet said perhaps the most telling modern-day link to this past are what those born and raised in the area recollect.
   A link to the past
   Catherine Joan Bluntzer, whose property is located by the river at Farm-to-Market Road 666, remembers her father telling her of when the Santa Margarita Post Office's name was changed to the Bluntzer Post Office on Sept. 9, 1899.
   Her grandfather, Nicholas Bluntzer, who settled in the county in the 1860s, established the Santa Margarita general store that contained the post office.
   When the post office name was changed, so was that of the general store.
   Catherine Joan Bluntzer will be among San Patricio residents, some who descend from Santa Margarita families, contributing oral histories to the museum/university project.
   The narratives will complement the museum exhibit of whatever artifacts are found in the digs.
   "Lots of people don't know Texas history and (Santa Margarita) is a site that was here long before many of our own ancestors came," Bluntzer said.
   Oral histories

David Adame/Caller-Times

A&M-CC archeologists work on a site on the Knolle farm near Sandia. Spanish frontier families once lived in the area, and ancestors of the Karankawas once occupied it.

   The team of archaeologists also is excavating more material at least 3,000 years old from two sites - a hut floor and a garbage pit - discovered last year on the Knolle farm near Sandia. The sites were once occupied and used by ancestors of the Karankawas.
   Many of the families who now live in the area are descendants of Irish and German pioneers who settled there in the early and mid-1800s, Drolet said. Their oral histories, he said, can reveal much about the encounters and relationships between all groups.
   Artifacts coupled with oral histories can have a significant ripple effect, said Felix D. Almaraz Jr., professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of books on Texas and the borderlands.
   'A pebble in a pond'
   "These personal histories together become part of a social history, then relate to a regional history," Almaraz said.
   "And in that way it's like dropping a pebble in a pond. The ripples extend out, eventually taking us to the bigger picture and that is that we all come from somewhere.
   "And if we don't know our roots, then we can't say much about our branches, of who we are today."