Encinal, Texas

This church was organized in 1908 by the Rev. Dr. M. W. Doggett, an evangelist for the Presbytery of Western Texas. Two years later, during the supply pastorate of the Rev. Harry W. Hamilton, members constructed a church building at this site. A one-room frame sanctuary, it was built on property donated by local rancher T. A. Coleman. The Rev. Hamilton was later called as the regular minister and served the congregation until his death in 1940, a pastorate of 30 years. Until 1950 the church was the only Protestant fellowship in the community.

A scenic South Texas ranch, the Alberca de Arriba Ranch is located along the Bordas Escarpment ten miles south of Mirando City. The Alberca spring, one of the few flowing springs in Webb County, is located near the old ranch headquarters. The ranch was founded in 1830 by Valentín de las Fuentes and his wife Tomasa de la Peña on a bluff overlooking the Alberca spring. Fuentes died in 1833, but the following year, the Mexican government granted his widow title to the land she and her husband had settled, a grant comprising 22,142 acres. In 1836 Indians, probably fighting for their seasonal camping site by the spring, forced the widow, her workers and tenants to flee. Tomasa soon returned and reestablished the ranch operation. Indian raids continued; often many of the ranch structures were burned, but Tomasa tenaciously had them rebuilt. Notwithstanding the Indian attacks and the constant threat posed by the stern surroundings, the ranch became a self-sustaining community. The Alberca spring provided the basis for existence in this harsh, remote environment. Cattle and horses were raised and by 1857 large fields were placed under cultivation. The ranch became a crossroads of wagon trails going from Laredo to the lower Gulf coast and from the Rio Grande valley to points north. In a renowned Spanish encyclopedia published in 1907 the settlement is described as a "locality and sweet water well situated southeast of Laredo on the road...from that city to Santo Domingo." By 1859 there were some forty stone structures at the ranch. Tomasa de la Peña, a remarkable Hispanic frontier woman who spent her life developing and defending her ranching enterprise in one of the most desolate sections of South Texas, died around 1860. The village was again abandoned during the Civil War when Confederate irregulars forced the inhabitants to flee. Tomasa's son and grandson, Sabas and Valentín, promptly volunteered in Edmund Jackson Davis 's First Texas Cavalry, U.S.A. , organized near Matamoros, Tamaulipas. At the end of the war, the family returned to the ranch but had to pursue almost half a century of litigation against the state of Texas to establish clear title. During this period, William von Rosenberg unsuccessfully tried to gain possession of the ranch by locating thirteen Confederate land scrips on the ranch. In 1907 the state Supreme Court finally established that the heirs of Valentín de las Fuentes and Tomasa de la Peña held a valid title to the ranch. In 1918 Antonio M. Bruni paid $82,198.11 for 12,749 acres of the original grant, including the old settlement, which he converted into his ranch headquarters. The ranch was the site of a famous gunfight between Texas Rangers and liquor smugglers from Guerrero, Tamaulipas, that occurred during Prohibition . Three tequileros were ambushed and shot dead by the rangers and buried on the spot. A corrido , Los Tequileros , which depicted the smugglers as tragic heroes, soon became popular along both sides of the Texas-Mexican border ( see CORRIDOS ). The southern section of the historic Aviator's oilfield, discovered in Webb County in 1922, is located at the ranch. Of some forty houses that originally existed in the nineteenth century settlement, only three remain-a schoolhouse, a chapel that doubled as a commissary, and the large main house, all made from hand-hewed caliche block. The extant structures are fine examples of nineteenth-century South Texas ranch architecture. The main ranchhouse shows the transition from the fortress-like, windowless structure with narrow troneras (gunports) that was necessary for defense to the more refined, spacious style that could be built once the region became pacified. Ruins of the workers' quarters indicate they were built of stone, as contrasted with the mesquite jacal that was the typical housing provided in most other ranches of South Texas at the time.

Darwin was on Farm Road 1472 and Santo Tomas Creek near the bank of the Rio Grande in northwestern Webb County. In the late nineteenth century the coal mining town of Darwin (originally called Cannel) was one of four such communities located about twenty-five miles upriver from Laredo, Texas. Limited mining in the area was first undertaken during the Spanish colonial era and then by the Cannel Coal Company which opened a mine in 1895. The town was named for David Darwin Davis, the superintendent of the Cannal Coal Company, and had a post office from 1896 to 1915. By June 1900 Darwin had a population of 1,039 inhabitants, one-third of which were miners. These miners, immigrants from Mexico, were mostly young men in their twenties and thirties, yet thirteen were below the age of thirteen. The miners labored long hours for small wages and under hard and unsafe conditions. The men doing the blasting and loading the ore carts were paid by the amount of coal they could dig; some of the miners had to work from early morning until midnight to support their families. For ten hours of labor the miners were paid from fifty to eighty-five cents. From their wages, twenty cents a month was deducted for medicine and health care and $1.75 for rent. Workers lived in small, two-room, frame houses, and living conditions at Darwin were generally poor. Tuberculosis and other diseases were widespread. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Darwin had restaurants, a bakery, post office, and more than one barbershop. Recreational activities included sports, festivals, and music. In 1914 the population of Darwin had dropped to 800, and it was a station on the Rio Grande and Eagle Pass Railroad. At this time Thomas Worsham was the community postmaster, and H. H. Jefferies was a cattle breeder in the area. By 1920 population figures had further decreased to 543. With this decline many of the businesses closed. Most miners moved downriver to the more modern mining community of Dolores. In fact, the mining shafts at Darwin had already been connected to those of Dolores. In 1936 the community had a population of seventy-five, and there was one business. More and more industries had begun to use petroleum instead of coal, and the mines of Dolores were much more efficient than the ones at Darwin. The Cannel Coal Company officially abandoned Darwin in 1939. Only a slag heap, a few foundations, a cemetery, and a historical marker were at the site of the community by the early twenty-first century. The Laredo-Colombia Solidarity International Bridge connecting Texas to Nuevo León was constructed nearby in 1992.

(1845-1925) A native of Alabama, John M. Ramsey served in the Confederate army during the Civil War (1862-1865). In 1867 he married Rebecca Alexander (d. 1885), and in 1870 they settled in Lee County, Texas. In 1889, after his wife died, Ramsey moved with his eight children to La Salle County, where he acquired extensive farm and ranch land. A pioneer leader in the community of Artesia Wells, he participated in political affairs and served as a school trustee.

Los Ojuelos, or Ojuelos, is on Farm Road 649 some 2½ miles south of Mirando City near the southeastern corner of Webb County. Centuries before Spanish settlers arrived, Indians camped on the site, one of the few locations in the semiarid surroundings where surface water was dependable. The local springs attracted Eugenio Gutiérrez, who received a land grant from the king of Spain in 1810 and eventually attempted to settle in the area. But frequent Indian attacks forced Gutiérrez to abandon the site for the relative safety of his hometown, Guerrero, Tamaulipas. Eugenio's son Isidro returned in 1835 and managed to clear the title for two sitios of land, but the Indian threat once again proved to be insurmountable. In 1850 a company of Texas Rangers , under the command of Capt. John S. (Rip) Ford , established a camp at Los Ojuelos to police the trade road running through the site from Laredo to Corpus Christi. Once the Indians' dominance in the area had been curtailed, José María Guerra, a grandson of Eugenio Gutiérrez, returned to Los Ojuelos. In 1857 he built an irrigation system and a chapel, as well as a stone enclosure to protect the springs from further Indian raids. These amenities and Guerra's efforts to attract new residents enticed many Mexicans from the Rio Grande valley; by 1860 about 400 had settled at Hacienda de los Ojuelos. The Texas-Mexican Railway in 1881 bypassed the town a few miles to the north, and when it connected with the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway in 1885, freight headed to and from Laredo was shipped mostly by rail instead of passing through Los Ojuelos. An Ojuelos post office opened in 1894, but the population of the settlement had declined to 178 by 1904. The Ojuelos post office was discontinued in 1917, and Los Ojuelos remained quiet until O. W. Killam discovered oil nearby in the early 1920s. Killam established Mirando City just north of Los Ojuelos, and children from the new town attended the Los Ojuelos school through the 1940s. The 1948 county highway map shows an active school and eight homes in Los Ojuelos. The oil boom temporarily expanded the community's population, but quiet returned to Los Ojuelos once drilling at the Mirando City oilfield stopped. From the 1950s through the 1980s Los Ojuelos remained virtually abandoned; its buildings were used by local ranchers.