Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters

The Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters, a nineteenth-century historic ranching complex in southern Dimmit County, is comprised of a recently restored, one-story, five-room, stone vernacular residence and several intact ranching features which are situated in the general vicinity: a shallow well dug into sandstone bedrock, an accumulation of cattle pens, and a stone-lined sheep-dipping vat. While the precise date when the house was constructed cannot be documented, evidence from General Land Office records and an archeological investigation made on the site in 1983 suggests that the structure dates from the mid-1870s and that it was associated with the early development of the livestock industry in southwest Texas. The Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters derives further significance from its association with early twentieth-century owner Ed Kotula, the "Wool King of Texas," and from the fact that it is one of the few buildings still standing that dates from the initial settlement of present-day Dimmit County. In particular, the Valenzuela Ranchhouse is important because it embodies many of the distinctive features of stone buildings constructed in southwest Texas until the end of the nineteenth century, and it enhances an understanding of the duration and distribution of specific architectural styles, details, plans, and materials.

The Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters is located in southern Dimmit County approximately 2 miles north of the Webb County line and 55 miles north of Laredo, 10 miles southwest of Catarina, and 23 miles southeast of Carrizo Springs. The Nueces River flows some 19 miles north of the Ranch headquarters, which is located about 200 feet east of the present-day channel of Valenzuela Creek, now a dry arroyo. The surrounding plains are part of the South Texas brasada, or brush country, and the land abounds in dense thickets of cacti, thorny brush, and mesquite. While the general area now resembles a desert much of the year, there was permanent water in the creeks at the end of the Civil War and good grazing for sheep and cattle.

Despite the attractions of grass and water which the land between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers offered, there appear to have been few Anglo or Hispanic ranchers who dared to risk the threats of Indian and bandit attack. One early Spanish land grant which was made south of the Valenzuela Ranch in Webb County stretched from the Rio Grande to Piloncillo Hill in southern Dimmit County. However, as Fermina Guerra pointed out in her history of the earliest establishment of Hispanic ranches in northern Webb County, no residents of Laredo dared to venture many miles north of the Rio Grande. Early settlers described the Dimmit County area as "an unsettled wilderness." An English family from Frio County drove herds of sheep into the Carrizo Springs area in the early 1860s, and a number of other families settled on Pendencia Creek. But southwest Texas remained plagued by hostile Indians and Mexican bandits: in 1869, rancher Jim Roberts was killed about ten miles from his herd pen on San Roque Creek by Mexican raiders who drove his cattle off; Indians raided Carrizo Springs in 1872; ranchers reported some six small bands of bandits operating across the border in about 1876, when one of their camps was located on San Roque Creek; and early settler Jake English recalled the raid of 1878 as having been made by some 70 Apaches, one of the "largest bands of Indians I ever saw" in Dimmit County.

The land and few people of southwest Texas were rough and forbidding, but some interest in the area began to develop by the mid-nineteenth century. With the opening of freight lines northward out of Laredo in the 1850s and 1860s, individuals had opportunities to view the brasada and gauge its suitability for grazing. As historian Fermina Guerra described the sequence of events in northern Webb County (bibliography), teamsters were attracted by the broad, grass-covered plains and running creeks there and began to talk about it as a place for a homestead. Subsequently, between 1860 and 1890, at least forty small Mexican ranches were established along northern Webb County creeks and headquarters were constructed, a number of them assembled from stone quarried from the beds of nearby streams. Ranch headquarters were traditionally located immediately adjacent to running water; one constructed in 1882, perhaps by stonemason Don Trinidad González, had stone walls 18 inches thick. Troneras, apertures in the wall from which guns could be fired, remained standard architectural features because of Indian raids.

Interest in land in southern Dimmit County appears to have been roughly contemporaneous with that in similar areas in Webb County, with the much-patented property being comprised of small tracts of 320 to 640 acres. Such tracts originally had been covered by land scrip issued to the numerous railroad companies which were eligible to receive them according to the 1854 act to encourage the construction of railroads in Texas by donations of land. The property on which the Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters would eventually be located was covered by a part of survey 413, issued to the Texas & New Orleans Railroad Company on February 13, 1861, and sold the same day to Houston resident Albert L. Catlin. Catlin, who continued to live in Houston and seems to have viewed the property only from an investor's perspective, sold the land scrip on March 22, 1872, to Thomas Kearney for $130.00 (approximately 20¢ per acre), a price which strongly suggests that the lands covered by Land Scrip No. 960 comprised an unimproved rural tract in the early 1870s.

Kearney, who had been born on Staten Island, New York, on September 4, 1810, resided briefly in Monterey, Mexico, during the Civil War. In 1869, he became a Quarantine Officer at the Port of Corpus Christi, and the following year he was appointed Collector of Customs at the Port. His purchase of 320 acres on Valenzuela Creek in 1872 represented both the first of many such acquisitions he was to make in Dimmit County and heralded. his reorientation from the coastal area to the ranch lands of southwest Texas. By 1875, he had entered a partnership with Laredo resident James Carr, and the two men were reported buying 139 bucks in San Antonio that same year. It is likely that at least two of the first stone rooms of the Valenzuela Ranchhouse were constructed during the period when Kearney and Carr established their partnership. Certainly, the building was there by July 1877 when a surveyor running lines in southern Dimmit County used "Carr's house" as one of his landmarks.

The Kearney-Carr partnership appears to have been a successful one, with Kearney providing the financial investment and Carr the expertise in livestock management. The two men acquired numerous tracts adjacent to their property on Valenzuela Creek, and by 1883 they held 84,600 acres in Dimmit and Webb counties. Kearney's additional holdings of 68,880 acres in the Galan Grant in Webb County meant that, with Carr, he owned sufficient property to raise a flock in excess of 150,000 sheep. Additional income may have accrued to the men by virtue of fees collected from passengers who traveled on the Laredo and Encinal to Eagle Pass road. Freight and passengers stopped regularly at the stone house after 1880, and Kearney and Carr took advantage of the freight line to transport their animals and wool to Encinal, Laredo, and Corpus Christi.

Beginning in 1880, a series of droughts struck south Texas, the repercussions of which may have prompted Kearney to sell his half interest in the Dimmit County ranch to C. M. MacDowell and Thomas C. Sheldon for $65,000, in March of 1884. MacDowell and Sheldon, in turn, worked out a property transfer with Carr so that they received the eastern half of the ranch--thereafter known as the Piloncillo Ranch--and Carr received the western half--thereafter known as the Valenzuela Ranch.

Carr continued to remain closely involved with the workings of the Valenzuela Ranch until 1894 when he sold his 42,287 acres to Edward Kotula, a prominent San Antonio merchant who was born in Poland in 1844 and migrated with his parents to Panna Maria in 1854. After the Civil War, Kotula clerked for D. & A. Oppenheimer, a wholesale merchant in San Antonio, and then opened his own business in 1869. Until 1893, he was one of San Antonio's most successful merchants, making major transactions in wool commissions. The Valenzuela Ranch was the focus of his highly successful ranching activities between 1894 and 1907, and he died in San Antonio while preparing for a visit to the Ranch.

After Kotula's death, the Valenzuela Ranch was administered by his heirs who then sold the land to J. Shugar of Dallas County, in 1927. Shugar, in turn, conveyed the land to the Temple Lumber Company, which transferred title to Southern Pine Company in January 1931. In 1936, Southern Pine Company sold 26,898.5 acres, including the Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters, to George W. Lyles who held the property for 24 years. The most recent owners have been members of the Harrison family who continue to operate the property as a ranch and who initiated the restoration of the Valenzuela Ranchhouse in 1979.

While much of the history of the Valenzuela Ranch Headquarters has been obscured by a paucity of written records concerning its construction and use, enough of the original fabric remains to argue for the significance of the house and associated features. Not only is the ranching complex associated with Edward Kotula, an important historic figure in the development of ranching in Southwest Texas, but its materials, plan, and style are representative of the broad pattern of Hispanic-inspired architecture of the nineteenth century. The Valenzuela Ranchhouse, cattle pens, well, stone sheep dip, and sheep pen are excellent examples of specific ranching types and methods of construction, and they clearly illustrate patterns common to architectural features associated with the livestock industry. The Ranchhouse, which may well be the oldest standing residential structure in Dimmit County, is an excellent example of stone vernacular architecture, and it extends our understanding of the distribution of that type not only geographically but through time, as well. The presence of otherwise archaic architectural features, such as the troneras, provides new evidence of late nineteenth-century frontier life on the Texas border while the typical rejoneado style employed in the construction of the Ranchhouse demonstrates the persistence of traditional Hispanic construction techniques.