DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, every good story needs a man who sees something nobody else does — and in the lower Rio Grande Valley, that man was John Closner. A Wisconsin native, mind you, not a born-and-bred South Texan, but sometimes it takes an outsider to look at forty thousand acres of arid, sun-baked Hidalgo County land and think: I can make something of this.
In 1895, Closner did something nobody in the lower Rio Grande Valley had done before — he established the first steam-powered irrigation system down here. And then, as if to prove the point, he grew sugar cane. Not just any sugar cane.
Award-winning sugar cane. He entered a sample for judging at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, and it came home wearing a ribbon.
Now, you start waving prize-winning sugar cane in front of financiers and agriculturists, and you have their attention. Closner's promotion of the lower Rio Grande did exactly that — convinced a number of serious money men that this valley was worth a bet. Five years after that World's Fair moment, in 1909, four of those believers — H.
N. Pharr, J. C.
Kelly, John C. Conway, and A. W.
Roth — formed the Louisiana-Rio Grande Canal Company. The LRG Canal Company, as folks called it. Their ambition was not small: transform roughly forty thousand acres of arid land into productive farmland.
To pull that off, the company built two pumping stations to divert water right out of the Rio Grande, running it through an elaborate irrigation system out to a planned community of small farmsteads. Water where there was no water. Life where there was only dust and heat.
The LRG Canal Company did its work, and then its successor — the Hidalgo County Water Improvement District Number Two — carried it further, along with other similar operations across the region. The result was a wave of Anglo farmers and settlers rolling in from the midwestern United States into what had been a mainly Hispanic corner of Texas. The harvests that followed were, by all accounts, bountiful — bountiful enough to propel the Rio Grande Valley to the forefront of Texas agriculture by the mid-twentieth century.
The region earned a name for itself in the bargain: the Winter Garden of Texas. Not a bad legacy for a Wisconsin man with a steam pump and a stalk of sugar cane.
What the marker says
Wisconsin native John Closner established the first steam-powered irrigation system in the lower Rio Grande Valley in 1895. Closner successfully grew sugar cane and entered a sample for judging at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. The award-winning sugar cane and Closner's promotion of the lower Rio Grande convinced a number of financiers and agriculturists to invest in the region's irrigation and development possibilities. In 1909 H. N. Pharr, J. C. Kelly, John C. Conway, and A. W. Roth formed the Louisiana-Rio Grande (LRG) Canal Company to transform about 40,000 acres of arid land in Hidalgo County into productive farmland. To do this the company built two pumping stations to divert water from the Rio Grande through an elaborate irrigation system to a planned community of small farmsteads. The agricultural success of the LRG Canal Company, its successor the Hidalgo County Water Improvement District #2, and other similar operations in the region resulted in an influx of Anglo farmers and settlers from the midwestern U.S. into this mainly Hispanic region of Texas. The bountiful harvests propelled the Rio Grande Valley to the forefront of Texas agriculture by the mid-20th century and earned the region a reputation as the "Winter Garden" of Texas. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995