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For
longer than most of us can remember, Texans have been squabbling over
which community is the
state’s oldest.
The principal players in this ongoing feud are a couple of East
Texas cities, Nacogdoches
and San Augustine,
and a West Texas village,
Ysleta.
Now, it appears there may be another contender.
History watcher Billy Bob Crim of Kilgore
recently sent us an article from Marfa’s
Big Bend Sentinel indicating that Presidio,
on the Texas-Mexico
border in the Big
Bend country, may also be a player in the oldest town competition.
While it recently observed only its twentieth anniversary as a municipality,
Presidio claims
it was first inhabited about 1200 A.D., more than 500 years before
the Declaration of Independence, and was founded in 1683 when Jesuit
priests from El
Paso established a number of missions in the area, an event commemorated
by Presidio’s Santa
Teresa de Jesus Catholic Church each fall.
Archeologists claim hunter-gatherer tribes came to the valleys of
the Rio Grande and Rio Concho rivers about 1200 A.D.
Like
Presidio, Nacogdoches’
claim as the oldest town is based on archeological research which
established that mounds found in the area date from approximately
1250 A.D. when Indians built lodges along LaNana and Banita creeks,
which converge just south of Nacogdoches.
The mounds were found to contain human bones and pottery.
San Augustine
also had an Ayish Indian village as early as the 1200s and the first
European visitors arrived there early in the 1540s. In 1717 Father
Antonio Margil de Jesus established a Spanish mission near the
Indian village on Ayish Bayou.
Ysleta, now
part of the city of El
Paso, has been continuously occupied since 1682 when the Tigua
Indians came here from their pueblo at Isleta, New Mexico. The Handbook
of Texas says with a touch of reservation that Ysleta
“is perhaps the oldest town in Texas.”
But East Texans take the half-hearted assumption with more than a
grain of salt.
Even Presidio’s
claim is a little weak. Archeologists say details of the region’s
archeology remains spotty. “We’ve worked on this thing for years,
and we’re still not able to work out who was where at what time,”
admitted Bob Mullouf, director of the Center for Big Bend Studies
at Sul Ross State University.
Every town seems to have its own way of staking a claim in the oldest
town sweepstakes.
We like the story told us by a Nacogdoches
resident with a good memory. He says a local booster wanted to make
the claim that Nacogdoches
was Texas’ oldest town
and went to a historian at Stephen F. Austin State University. He
asked him: “Can anyone prove we aren’t the oldest town?”
The historian thought about it for a few minutes and concluded, “Nope,
I don’t think they can.”
“Okay,” said the booster, “from now on, we’re the oldest town in Texas.”
© Bob
Bowman
Bob Bowman's East
Texas January 18, 2009 Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 70 East Texas newspapers |
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