Memorial Hospital

Duane's take

The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Now, picture 1853: Rio Grande country, Starr County, the kind of land that doesn't give anything up easy. A man named E.

R. Hord, State Representative and U.S. Congressman, goes and raises a building out here.

Not a shack, not a lean-to; a proper stone structure with walls twenty-eight inches thick. Twenty-eight inches. You could lose a man in those walls.

The stone to fill them didn't just appear, either. Somebody hitched up the ox-teams and hauled that rock in, slow and stubborn, the way only oxen and determined Texans can manage. And the beams (those came by boat, landed right at a nearby dock).

So you've got stone coming overland and timber coming by water, all of it converging on this one spot in 1853, all of it stacked and mortared by human hands into something meant to last. And last it did. When the Civil War came rolling through, those twenty-eight-inch walls found a new purpose: military headquarters, right here in Starr County.

The building that Hord raised to stand against the South Texas elements ended up standing at the center of history itself. Stone that thick has a way of outliving the reasons it was built.

What the marker says

1853 building erected by E. R. Hord, State Representative and U.S. Congressman. Stone in 28" walls hauled by ox-teams; beams came by boat, landed at nearby dock. Military headquarters during the Civil War. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965