Rockport was once the cowtown of Gulf Coast

By Murphy Givens

   At the end of the Civil War, soldiers came home barefoot and broke. They returned to South Texas to find vast herds of wild, unbranded cattle, there for the taking, and they took longhorns not branded, trail-broke them, and drove them to Kansas rail-heads where they were destined for northern cities hungry for beef.
   In 1866, 260,000 head of cattle went up the trail. This cheap Texas beef glutted the market and prices fell to next to nothing. The next year, 37,000 head went north. The value of the longhorn was reduced to the value of its hide, the tallow that could be rendered, and horns and bones used to make buttons. Slaughter houses, or packeries, were built from Corpus Christi to Galveston. The center of it all was Rockport.
   Down the coast, the owner of a packery at Flour Bluff, James M. Doughty, was unhappy with his location — too far from open water. Doughty and partner Richard H. Wood built cattle pens on a rocky ledge overlooking Aransas Bay. Then came William Hall, a Maine Yankee, who built a packery, which was followed by a dozen others. The Coleman-Mathis-Fulton combine built a packery at Fulton, three miles up the coast. One large packery was at Frandolig Point, between Rockport and Fulton. Doughty and A.W. Clarke built a packery south of Rockport, on a site later occupied by Heldenfels shipbuilding.
   Packers would pay $4 to $7 a head for anything that would pass the brand inspectors. At the packeries, the cattle were slaughtered and “shucked’’ of their hides. The meat was boiled in cisterns for the tallow. Bones and horns were salvaged. Unusable meat was dumped into the bays. A large packery employing 40 workers could process up to 250 head of cattle a day.
   At Rockport, ships loaded salted hides, barrels of tallow, and heaps of horns and bones. The ships brought nail kegs filled with silver dollars for exchange. By 1874, Rockport had two hotels, four churches, one county courthouse, a newspaper, the Rockport Transcript, and an assortment of gambling houses and saloons; the most famous saloon was named “The Finish.’’
   Within a decade of the beginning of the packeries, harsh winter “die-outs’’ and drought depleted the herds, meat prices climbed, and it was no longer profitable to slaughter cattle for hides and tallow alone. But Rockport continued to thrive on the shipment of live cattle by sea. The coming of the railroad led to the end of shipping cattle by sea. Rockport turned to shipbuilding, fishing, and tourism, its economic mainstays today.
   The Rockport-Fulton area betrays little evidence of its past. All that remains of that era is the Fulton Mansion. You have to close your eyes and imagine what Rockport was like. With its cattle pens, slaughterhouses and dirt streets filled with wild-eyed longhorns and cowboys dusty from the trail, it was as much a cowtown as Fort Worth, Abilene or Dodge City ever was.

Sources include “Texas Coastal Bend’’ by Alpha Kennedy Wood; “Aransas’’ by Sue Hastings Taylor and William Allen; “Refugio’’ by Hobart Huson; and Caller-Times archive articles.

Viewpoints editor Murphy Givens writes a history column each Wednesday in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.