DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Way back when Corpus Christi was still finding its feet, one man decided what this young town needed more than just about anything was a mill. That man was Captain John Anderson — born in Sweden in 1813, a seafarer by trade, a Texan by choice.
He brought his family here in 1852, and before long he'd built a house right on the waterfront at this very spot. Now, sometime in those 1850s, or maybe not until the 1870s depending on who you ask, a windmill went up alongside that house. The sources don't entirely agree, and I'll let that mystery stand.
What we do know is what that mill did once it got to turning. It ground salt. It ground corn.
It cut wood. Wind-powered, patient, and relentless — just like the coast itself. Here's the part that really gets me: workers would head out to the shores of Laguna Madre and to the salt water ponds in the heat of summer, gather up chunks of salt right off the shoreline, load them onto boats, and haul them here.
Then the mill got to work. The fine-ground salt went off to distant markets — table salt, bound for kitchens far from the Gulf. The coarse-grained salt?
That went to the packing plants strung all along the Texas coast, places that were doing a booming business preserving meat and curing hides in the years after the Civil War. That's the 1860s rolling into the decades beyond, and those packing plants needed every grain Anderson's mill could give them. The Anderson Mill kept Corpus Christi supplied, kept mill workers employed, kept freighters moving.
It was one of the earliest industries this town ever had, and for a good long stretch, it was indispensable. Then came 1900. The Anderson family looked at that old windmill and decided its time had passed.
They tore it down and built themselves a two-story residence right here in its place. Eleven years later, in 1911, that structure was sold, folded into something bigger — the Nueces Hotel, which was completed in 1913. For decades the old hotel stood on this ground that had known salt and wind and the sound of a mill grinding through a Gulf Coast summer.
And then, in 1970, Hurricane Celia came through. The hotel was damaged. And after that, it was razed.
So what Captain John Anderson started with a windmill and a boatload of salt from Laguna Madre — all of it is gone now. Nothing left but the story, the marker, and the wind still moving off the water like it always has.
What the marker says
One of the earliest industries in Corpus Christi was a mill erected at this site by Captain John Anderson (1813-1898), a Swedish-born seafarer who brought his family to Texas in 1852. Anderson built a house here in the 1850s, when this property was on the waterfront. The mill may have been constructed at that time, although some sources claim that it was not in operation until the 1870s. The wind-powered mill ground salt and corn and cut wood. Chunks of salt were gathered from the shores of Laguna Madre and salt water ponds in the summer and transported here by boat. Much of it was ground fine for table salt and shipped to distant markets. The coarse-grained salt was used in preserving meat and curing hides at the many packing plants that flourished along the Texas coast after the Civil War (1861-1865). The Anderson Mill supplied needed products to Corpus Christi citizens and provided employment for mill workers and freighters. In 1900 the Anderson family demolished the windmill and built a two story residence here. The structure was sold in 1911 to become part of the Nueces Hotel, completed in 1913. The old hotel was razed after it was damaged by hurricane Celia in 1970. (1976)