Hebbronville, Texas

Don Bonifacio Garza traveled extensively in the late 1800s along the historic oxcart road from San Diego to Peña station (1 mi. E), then to Rio Grande City, Roma, and Mier. He traded and sold American and Mexican goods and carried news to American Tejano ranches of Spanish and Mexican land grant ancestry. In 1893, Garza built this house, which was also Hebbronville's post office for a few years. Don Bonifacio distributed water and sold bloques de sillar (limestone blocks) in mule-drawn carts. His poetic greetings were legendary. The house is also known as Casa de Quatro Aguas,” (Caidas), or “House of Four Waterfalls” for its steeply pitched roof. In 1898, Don Bonifacio Garza sold the house to José Angel Garza (no relation), a Hebbronville pioneer and entrepreneur. The house is sited within the original townsite of Hebbronville platted in 1894. This has been home to several descendants of Spanish pioneer families. The house also provided sanctuary for nuns exiled during the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, as well as nuns displaced during Mexico's Cristero War of the 1920s. The home often housed professors of El Colegio Altamirano (1898-1958), a nearby Spanish-language school for grades one through six; Profesora Emilia Davila was the last occupant. The two-story modified rectangular plan dwelling features a rare Austrian-style gable-on-hip roof with dormers. Thick limestone blocks combined with a caliche and stucco exterior to help regulate the interior temperature year-round. Earlier thatch and wooden shingle roofs caught fire at least five times before metal roof was installed. Today the oldest house in Hebronville is a model of craftsmanship and a powerful connection entwined in Tejano history and Texas’ Western past. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark – 1962

Helen Sewell Harbison, rancher and civic leader, fifth child of Isaac Newton and Martha (Linville) Sewell, was born in Skidmore, Missouri, on August 19, 1896. During the following decade the Sewells lived on farms and in small towns in Missouri and Kansas. When Helen was eleven, her father sold his interest in a grocery and dry-goods store in Osawatomie, Kansas, and moved his family to a farm in Texas. It consisted of 160 isolated semidesert acres, fifteen miles out over sandy trails from the little cattle-shipping community of Hebbronville. For the next 3½ years Helen worked in her family's fields, walking behind a mule and a plough, without benefit of school, church, or medical attention. Helen's education was intermittent and haphazard, but she finished high school in Alice in 1917 and went on to attend the University of Texas for a year, earning a teacher's certificate and becoming keenly interested in woman suffrage . During the summer of 1918 she taught on La Partición Ranch in southern Jim Hogg County. And when in July of that year the first primary election in which Texas women were allowed to vote was held, Helen rode horseback for thirty miles to Hebbronville to cast her vote. In the fall of 1918, she started teaching eighty first and second graders in Hebbronville. Most of her students did not speak English, but school rules prohibited her from teaching in Spanish (which she spoke). In March 1919 she left teaching to work as a temporary county and district clerk of Jim Hogg County, a position to which she was later elected, and which she held until 1923. While she was working at the courthouse she met Texas Ranger (and later sheriff) Pelton Bruce Harbison. They married on December 24, 1921. In 1928 she and "Mr. Pell" moved to a ranch they bought a few miles south of Hebbronville, where they reared one son and five daughters. In 1942 the Harbisons moved to Austin to give their children better educational opportunities, but they returned to Hebbronville a year later, dissatisfied with city life. After her husband's death on August 5, 1956, Helen operated the ranch for almost thirty years. At first she ran a successful dairy farm; in the mid-1970s she turned to raising beef. In addition, she found time to write poetry and review books, and was in demand as a speaker at community affairs in Hebbronville and Jim Hogg County. She was a staunch supporter of the Hebbronville Methodist Church, whose chapel she kept filled with blossoms from her award-winning flower garden. She died of a heart attack at the Harbison ranch on November 23, 1985.

The old cowboy saying that "there are as many trails north as there are ranchers" may apply to this route. Firsthand information on the Potter-Blocker Trail comes from Jack Potter's Cattle Trails of the Old West (1935), which describes it as being one of several collateral branches of the Western Trail . The trail has had a variety of names. Jack Potter preferred the name Potter-Bacon Cutoff. In the spring of 1883, according to Potter, Alfred T. Bacon, manager of the New England Livestock Company, purchased a herd of 3,000 Mexican cattle for delivery at Cheyenne, Wyoming. He received the herd at Peña Station, near Hebbronville, Texas, and hired Potter to trail them north. The herd joined the Western Trail at Collins Station, near the site of present-day Alice, and by June it had reached Albany, northeast of Abilene, Texas. There, Potter received word from Bacon to leave the Western Trail and try a cutoff that might save some twenty days' trailing time. From Albany Potter headed northwest, passed Rice Springs at the site of present Haskell, and crossed the Brazos to reach Matador, where he veered north to Field's Crossing on the Red River and entered Charles Goodnight 's JA Ranch . Potter was in the land of the "Winchester Quarantine ," instituted to turn away herds of Mexican cattle suspected of carrying Texas Fever . Goodnight's manager sent Potter swinging north of Amarillo through the OX Ranch range to Tascosa. He continued northwest to Channing and Middle Water, turned north to Perico Springs, and exited Texas south of Kenton, Oklahoma. His route then led to Las Animas, Colorado, and on to Cheyenne. The Potter-Bacon Trail was shorter than the Western Trail, but was drier and crossed more barren land. Abner P. Blocker used part of the same or a similar trail after 1885 to move cattle from the south into the sprawling XIT range, hence the later designation of Potter-Blocker Trail. During the later 1880s the XIT Ranch used part of the trail in moving its herds to pastures in Montana. Potter's route probably was never a consistently used cattle trail. The coming of rail lines in the late 1880s to the Panhandle and opposition from homesteaders made cattle trailing north impractical after 1889.

The original part of this hotel was built by C. F. Luque in 1915 for the owner, Viggo Kohler, to accommodate businessmen and area travelers. Soon after it opened, Hotel Viggo served as a fortress when area ranchers feared an attack by Pancho Villa's men. As a result of the town's oil boom, a south wing was added in 1924. The Mission Revival hotel has been a landmark on the Jim Hogg County Courthouse square since Hebbronville's early days. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1983

Sixto E. Garcia opened the New York Store in 1909 at Pine and Tilley streets, moving to this location in 1924. The general store later offered a variety of goods and a tailoring and cleaning wing. Garcia's daughter Herlinda married store clerk Blas M. Salinas in 1938. They and their children lived upstairs while continuing the family business after S.E. Garcia's death in 1944. The New York Store has remained in the same family for more than a century. The two-story commercial building features common bond brick with a dentil course and a stepped parapet above storefront windows and a projecting awning. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2010