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Corpus Christi history at a glance

Corpus Christi Bay flanks one side of the city. Some 277,454 people called Corpus Christi home in the year 2000.

   This area was originally inhabited by the Karankawa peoples and other American Indians. The city is named for Corpus Christi Bay, which, tradition holds, was sighted and named by Spanish explorer Alonzo Alvarez de Piñeda on the feast day of Corpus Christi in 1519.
   But in its earliest days, during the Republic of Texas, this place was known as Kinney’s Rancho, after Colonel Henry L. Kinney, who founded a trading post at the site in 1839. During 1845 and 1846 it was used as a military base by General Zachary Taylor, who later became the 12th president of the United States, and it became a transportation center during the Mexican War (1846-1848). Corpus Christi was incorporated as a city in 1852 and grew as a farming and ranching center.
   Beginning in 1862, during the Civil War, the port was blockaded by Union gunboats, and it fell to Union troops in November 1863.
   The construction of a deepwater channel to the Gulf of Mexico in 1926 opened the Port of Corpus Christi to oceangoing vessels and spurred the growth of industry.