San Perlita "Pearl of the Valley"

Duane's take

The official marker tells this story, and I'm just the voice carrying it down the road to you. Listen close. Way back in 1790, the King of Spain issued a land grant called the Carricitos grant, and he handed it to a man named Jose Narcisso Cavozos.

Just picture that for a moment. A king, an ocean away, signing his name to this particular stretch of South Texas earth. That land sat and waited, as land sometimes does, through decades of change and border-drawing and history piling up on history.

Then came 1926, and with it the Missouri Pacific Railroad, extending a branch line out to this area. And where the railroad goes, well, people and purpose tend to follow. The San Perlita Development Company moved in and got to work.

More than twenty thousand acres of land, cleared. That is not a small undertaking. They prepared that ground for staple crops, vegetable crops, and citrus crops, and right alongside all of that clearing and planting, they laid out the townsite itself.

San Perlita. The Pearl of the Valley, they called it. Since that development took hold, the area has made significant contributions to the quality of life in this part of the Rio Grande Valley.

A king's old land grant, a railroad pushing south, twenty thousand acres turned to crops and community. Some pearls, it turns out, take a couple of centuries to come together.

What the marker says

Part of the Carricitos land grant issued in 1790 by the King of Spain to Jose Narcisso Cavozos, this agricultural community and the surrounding farmland were developed soon after the Missouri Pacific Railroad extended a branch line to this area in 1926. The San Perlita Development Company cleared more than twenty thousand acres of land for growing staple, vegetable, and citrus crops and laid out the townsite of San Perilta. Since its development, the area has made significant contributions to the quality of life in this part of the Rio Grande Valley. (1984)