Corpus Christi History
By Murphy Givens

Wednesday, Feb. 10, 1999

City's founder was part hero and part rogue

   No historical figure I've written about has been as hard to get a handle on as Henry Lawrence Kinney, Corpus Christi's founder. He was a puzzling man, a hero and a villain, a visionary and a scoundrel. But the early history of this city was shaped by this one man, who founded the town and promoted it shamelessly.
    He was born on the day Napoleon was exiled to the isle of Elba, on June 3, 1814. He was the third of six children born to Simon and Phoebe Kinney. They lived at Sheshequin, near Towanda, in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. His grandparents were killed in the last Indian massacre in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War.
    Kinney's father Simon owned a store and Henry Lawrence worked in the store. On the last day of 1832, the 18-year-old Kinney was attacked by a man who claimed Kinney was seeing his wife. Kinney was fined $1 for assault. He left Sheshequin, made his way to New Orleans, then traveled up the Mississippi River to Illinois.
    Kinney traveled up the Illinois River to the town of Peru, west of Chicago. He and a man named Ulysses Spaulding built a store in 1834. Kinney speculated in land and built a small hotel in 1836. His family followed him to Illinois.
    He claimed later that he took part in the Black Hawk War in Illinois in 1832. (It was a massacre of starving Indians, not a war.) But no records support that claim and, anyway, he was in Pennsylvania when the "war" was fought.
    In 1837, the great statesman Daniel Webster came to visit his son Fletcher, who owned a farm near Peru. Kinney was in charge of the welcoming committee. He gave Webster a carriage pulled by a matched team of cream-colored horses.
    Some say Kinney fell in love with Webster's daughter Julia and proposed marriage and was turned down. This rejection, it was said, caused a broken-hearted Kinney to leave Illinois. He may have proposed to Julia Webster, but he left Illinois for other reasons.
    Kinney in 1837 took a contract to build part of the Illinois-Lake Michigan Canal. After the success of the Erie Canal, the country was in the grips of canal fever. But many canal projects were financial disasters. Kinney went bankrupt when the Illinois canal project collapsed. He skipped town, leaving huge debts and unpaid canal workers. Family members were left to answer for his actions. (His father Simon died at Indiantown, in Bureau County, in 1859.) This skipping out when the going got tough was a pattern Kinney followed all his life. When in trouble, he lit out for distant places.
    Kinney made his way to Galveston. Somewhere along the way, he ran into a young Welshman who had been living in Alabama, William P. Aubrey, and the two decided to open a store on the Texas coast. Kinney put up the capital. (You wonder if his capital came from the money owed the canal workers.)
    Kinney arrived in Aransas City in 1838. He adopted the title of "Colonel" as a result of his "service" in the Black Hawk War. Kinney's and Aubrey's store specialized in selling military supplies to a Mexican federalist army camped at Fort Lipantitlan. (The northern states of Mexico were trying to secede from the central government, with the "federalists" trying to overthrow the "centralists.")
    Kinney became a leader almost immediately. Aransas City had the state's first custom house, but Lookout Point changed its name to Lamar to flatter Texas President Mireabeau Lamar, who ordered the custom house moved to the new town across Copano Bay. A meeting of citizens in Aransas City, called to protest the decision, was chaired by Kinney, who signed the declaration sent to the governor.
    Aubrey ran the store at Aransas City and Kinney hauled goods to an old Indian trading site near the west bank of the Nueces. In September of 1839, Kinney built a "jacal" and moved into it with a few supplies. He purchased two leagues of land from a lawyer named Levi Jones; this would cause him problems later.
    Kinney shifted supplies from the Aransas City store to the new place until the spring of 1840 when he and Aubrey closed the store at Live Oak Point and moved to the new location. He hired his own gunmen to protect the store from bandits and Indians. Within four years, by 1844, Kinney's Trading Post on Corpus Christi Bay had captured virtually all the Mexican trade.
    (This is the first of three parts. Part two will appear next Wednesday in this space.)