Harlingen: Six-Shooter Junction to Iwo Jima

In nineteen oh two, a Beeville lawyer named Lon C. Hill began buying land in the Rio Grande delta. He cleared brush, dug irrigation canals, and advertised the fertile bottomland to farmers in the Midwest who had never heard of the Rio Grande Valley. In nineteen oh four, when the Saint Louis, Brownsville, and Mexican Rail line was laid through, Hill platted a town on the north bank of the Arroyo Colorado and named it after a city in the Netherlands. The first passenger train rolled through on July fourth of that year.

The early town had a rough reputation. Ranchers, railroad workers, and river traders converged at the junction of two rail lines, and the saloons that served them earned the place the nickname Six-Shooter Junction. But Hill's irrigation canals were already transforming the countryside. By the nineteen teens, the Valley had become one of the most productive agricultural regions in Texas, growing citrus, cotton, and winter vegetables for markets across the country.

The second transformation came with the Second World War. The Army Air Forces opened Harlingen Army Airfield in July of nineteen forty-one, establishing it as a flexible gunnery school. By nineteen forty-four, the base was training the aerial gunners who would fly in B-twenty-nine Superfortresses over Japan. Before the school closed in nineteen forty-five, more than forty-eight thousand soldiers had trained here, making it one of the three largest gunnery training programs in the country.

The base's legacy lives on in a monument most visitors don't expect to find in South Texas. The Marine Military Academy in Harlingen holds the original full-scale working model of the Iwo Jima statue, the one sculptor Felix de Weldon used as the direct template for the cast bronze Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington. De Weldon built the plaster model within forty-eight hours of seeing Joe Rosenthal's photograph. In nineteen eighty-one, he donated it to the Academy. It was cut into one hundred seven pieces, shipped on ten flatbed trucks from Rhode Island, and dedicated at its current site on April sixteenth, nineteen eighty-two. The famous monument in Arlington is the copy. The original is here.