Ingleside: New town has an old
history
Ingleside is a new town - younger than I am - but
it has an old history. It began when George C. Hatch
arrived on Live Oak Peninsula with his family and
slaves riding in covered wagons.
Hatch
was a county clerk in Dyersburg, Tenn., who came to
Texas to fight in the revolution. He rode with Sam
Houston's scout, "Deaf" Smith, at the battle of San
Jacinto. Hatch's nephew Jim Bowie was killed at the
Alamo. On Sept. 12, 1842, when Texas was a Republic,
Hatch was serving on jury duty in San Antonio when
Mexican Gen. Adrian Woll raided the town and took
prisoners, including Hatch, back to Mexico.
Woll's Texas prisoners were held in a dungeon in
Perote Castle, chained together, but Hatch and a man
named Morgan managed to escape and made it back to
San Antonio.
In
1854, Hatch settled on 3,800 acres in San Patricio
County and built a big house on the bluff
overlooking Ingleside Bay. Hatch was the largest
landowner around and, like Texans of his time, he
had diverse interests. He raised cattle and hogs and
operated a store. He sold part of his land to John
Vineyard, who is often called the father of
Ingleside because he chose the town's name from a
Robert Burns poem.
Old
Ingleside was beginning to grow. Besides the
Hatches, early settlers were the Vineyards, Bordens,
Nolds, and Turners. Marcellus and George Turner,
with Youngs Coleman, made the first trail drives
from the area in 1857, '58 and '59. They were amazed
that it only took six months to drive the herd to
Kansas.
When
the Civil War broke out, the Turners sold their
holdings and invested the money in 1) slaves and, 2)
Confederate bonds. During the war, Union raiding
parties came ashore and federal gunboats used the
homes on the bluff for target practice. The Nolds'
academy was destroyed.
After
the war, George Hatch, a fierce Confederate, refused
to take an oath of allegiance to the Union. Hatch
and a widowed daughter, Annie Hatch Byrne, became
exiles in British Honduras. Youngs Coleman relocated
on a Mexican island in the Gulf and bought a coconut
plantation; he never returned. George Hatch and
daughter came back in three years after the oath was
no longer required.
Another of Hatch's daughters, Mary Susan, married
John Borden. John declined to invest in his brother
Gail's scheme to condense milk in a vacuum; he used
his money to establish a boys' school, the Ingleside
Academy. Gail, meanwhile, founded the company that
became Borden, Inc.
On
Sept. 5, 1872, George Hatch was returning from a
banking trip to Corpus Christi. After he crossed the
bay on the Reef Road, he was attacked by robbers and
shot to death in his buggy at Indian Point. Legend
holds that the killers were tracked down and
lynched, though there's no record to support it.
After
Hatch was killed, his son John returned from the
California gold fields a wealthy man. He also
brought back ideas that bore fruit. He planted a
75-acre vineyard and began making wine. Wine and
grapes were a big business in Ingleside until
Prohibition; the vines were killed by blight.
But
the rich blackland area around Ingleside had become
famous for its produce. Workers in packing sheds
sorted and packed cucumbers, radishes, squash,
tomatoes and watermelons. Ingleside "ice-rind"
watermelons were famous. Cotton and maize replaced
vegetable crops and the economy began to change when
Humble Oil (Exxon) built a tank farm and refinery
and Reynolds Metals located in the area. Economic
change continued with the coming of Naval Station
Ingleside.
When
Ingleside was incorporated, in 1951, it had a
population of 850; today, it has more than 8,000
citizens. You wonder what George Hatch or Marcellus
Turner would say about Ingleside today. The vast
land, stretching into the sunset, from nowhere to
nowhere, was what attracted them. But the country
they found disappeared with them.
P.S.
To sort out the names: After the San Antonio and
Aransas Pass Railroad came in 1887, the flag stop
called Palomas became Ingleside. What was Old
Ingleside, or Cove Village, metamorphosed into
Ingleside-on-the-Bay, next door to Naval Station
Ingleside, with a buffer that was once planned for
Bakersport. Have we got that right? Palomas became
New Ingleside which is now Ingleside. Old Ingleside
evolved into today's Ingleside-on-the-Bay.
Murphy Givens is a writer for the Corpus Christi
Caller-Times as well as a Texas historian. This
article is published with the author's expressed
permission; Copyright restrictions do apply.
E-mail Murphy Givens
