Boca Chica (Texas)

Boca Chica is a beach on the eastern portion of a subdelta peninsula of Cameron County, at the far south of the US State of Texas along the Gulf Coast. It is bordered by the Brownsville Ship Channel to the north, the Rio Grande River and Mexico to the south, and the Gulf of Mexico to the east. The area extends approximately 25 miles (40 km) east of the city of Brownsville. The peninsula is served by Texas State Highway 4—also known as the Boca Chica Highway, or Boca Chica Boulevard within Brownsville city limits—which runs east-west, terminating at the Gulf and Boca Chica Beach.

The Boca Chica area has historically consisted of Mexican land grants, Mexican and American ranches, a battlefield of the American Civil War (Battle of Palmito Ranch), a state park (Boca Chica State Park,[1] opened 1994), a small village (Boca Chica Village, c. 1960–2020), and, after the mid-2010s, an evolving private space launch facility (Boca Chica spaceport) which includes a large SpaceX development and manufacturing facility for space vehicles and launch vehicles, and a launch complex that has been used for ground-based and flight testing since 2019 and is intended for subsequent orbital launches; both are included in the term: SpaceX South Texas launch site.[2]

Boca Chica means "little mouth" in Spanish, as the Rio Grande River's flow is modest, and in droughts the mouth of the river may disappear altogether.[3]

The making of the area of Boca Chica

Transportation across Boca Chica has been an important part of the history of the area. A land transportation route existed across Boca Chica in the 19th century, starting at the Mexican port of Brazos Santiago, north of Boca Chica, and heading inland to the Rio Grande Valley area that would later become Brownsville. The shallow water sail port at Brazos Santiago was used by sailing ships that used Brazos Santiago Pass to enter the South Bay of Laguna Madre—a shallow, hypersaline natural bay—from the Gulf to transit goods to the mainland north of the Rio Grande.[4]:ch. 3 Historical artifacts of human usage from those eras remained as of 2013 illustrating road use during the Mexican–American War (circa 1846) and railroad use during the American Civil War. Two historical artifacts. Cypress pilings from a circa 1846 floating bridge and the "Palmetto Pilings" from a circa-1865 railroad bridge were both yet extant in 2013. Both are located within 0.5 mi (0.80 km) of the beach near the eastern terminus of Texas State Highway 4.[4]:3–38

In the late 19th century, much of the arable land was used for ranching. Historical ranches include Tulosa Ranch, Palmito Ranch, White’s Ranch, and Cobb’s Ranch.[4]:3–39 No historical Native American usage is known, and consultation with a number of tribes in 2013 identified no verbal record of native use of the area.[4]:3–39

In 1904, the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway was completed to Brownsville which "opened the area to northern farmers who began to come to the area at the turn of the twentieth century. They cleared the land, built irrigation systems and roads, and introduced large-scale truck farming and citrus farming. The new farming endeavors began a new period of prosperity around Brownsville."[4]

The availability of cheap land in the area created a strong interest in land speculation. Special trains were dispatched to bring land speculators to the area and by the early 1920s as many as 200 people a day were coming to see the land.

One of the more notable land speculation ventures was the construction of the Del Mar Resort on Boca Chica Beach. Advertised as being on the same latitude as Miami, the resort was built in the 1920s by Colonel Sam Robinson, who moved to the Rio Grande Valley in 1917. The resort had 20 day-cabins available for rent, a bathhouse, and a ballroom. It was quite successful resort until 1933, when a hurricane destroyed most of the buildings. The remaining buildings were turned into a base for the US Coast Guard during World War II. As a result of the Great Depression and the hurricane damage, the owners of the property were not able to reopen the resort after the end of the war.

The 1933 hurricane spurred the Works Progress Administration to take part in the dredging and construction of the port of Brownsville, a venture that the city had been trying to complete since 1928. The port was officially opened in 1936.[4]

The completion of the port and the dredging of the Brownsville Ship Channel created the human-made northern boundary of the Boca Chica peninsula. It cut the peninsula off from any land transport routes except from Brownsville to the east, which also was the transportation railhead for Boca Chica to the rest of the country,[4]

Civil War battlefield
Main article: Battle of Palmito Ranch

The Battle of Palmito Ranch is considered by some as the final battle of the conclusion of the American Civil War. It was fought 12–13 May 1865, on the banks of the Rio Grande east of current Brownsville, Texas and a few miles from the seaport of Los Brazos de Santiago.

Union and Confederate forces in southern Texas had been observing an unofficial truce since the beginning of 1865. But Union Colonel Theodore H. Barrett, newly assigned to command an all-black unit, and never having been in combat, ordered an attack on a Confederate camp near Fort Brown for unknown reasons. The Union attackers captured a few prisoners, but the following day the attack was repulsed near Palmito Ranch by Colonel John Salmon Ford, and the battle resulted in a Union defeat. Union forces were surprised by artillery, said to have been supplied by the French Army occupying the nearby Mexican town of Matamoros.[5]

Boca Chica Beach

Boca Chica Beach is part of the 10,680-acre (43.2 km2) Boca Chica tract of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The tract is a former Texas state park located in the Boca Chica Subdelta separated from Mexico by the Rio Grande. The park was acquired by the state of Texas and opened in May 1994. The state park land is now managed by the US Federal government as part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.[1]

Boca Chica Village
Main article: Boca Chica Village, Texas

Boca Chica Village is the current name of a small unincorporated community in located on Texas State Highway 4, about 22 mi (35 km) east of Brownsville. It was formed in 1967 under another name as a land development project, and a community of about 30 ranch-style houses were built before the settlement was devastated by Hurricane Beulah later that same year, which greatly affected the trajectory of the would-be town.

In 2014, the village was chosen by SpaceX as the location for the construction of an orbital launch facility.[6][7]

References
  1. Francis, Robert (16 April 2013). "Space port won't harm wildlife if precautions taken". Fort Worth Business Press. Archived from the original on 6 July 2020. Retrieved 12 August 2020.
  2. Baylor, Michael (21 September 2019). "Elon Musk's upcoming Starship presentation to mark 12 months of rapid progress". NASASpaceFlight.com. Archived from the original on 21 June 2020. Retrieved 12 August 2020. at SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica, there was not much more than a mound of dirt [in September 2018 but one year later] the mound of dirt has been transformed into an operational launch site – outfitted with the ground support equipment needed to support test flights of the methane-fueled Starship vehicles. ... SpaceX is now assembling the vehicles near their launch site
  3. 100 Classic Hikes in Texas : Boca Chica Beach Hike, 2009, Dan Klepper, ISBN 9781594854187, pages 116–118.
  4. Nield, George C. (May 2014). Draft Environmental Impact Statement: SpaceX Texas Launch Site (PDF) (Report). 1. Federal Aviation Administration, Office of Commercial Space Transportation. pp. 3-32–3-34. sources explicitly quoted from the FAA document include reference to Garza 2012b; Garza and Long 2012b; Hildebrand 1950; Garcia 2003
  5. Hunt, Jeffrey William (2002). The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch, p. 46. University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-73460-3
  6. Perez-Treviño, Emma (19 February 2014). "SpaceX continues local land purchases". Valley Morning Star. Retrieved 19 February 2014.
  7. Wasson, Erik (9 February 2019). "Trump border wall could split SpaceX's Texas launchpad in two". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 31 March 2019. Retrieved 31 March 2019 – via Los Angeles Times.
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