John McAllen and the Day the Railroad Arrived

The town of McAllen did not exist on August nineteenth, nineteen oh four. On August twentieth, it did.

That was the day the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway pushed its tracks through the Santa Anita Ranch, the sprawling cattle operation that José Manuel Gómez had established on a Spanish land grant a century before. By nineteen oh four the ranch had passed through many hands. It was now associated with John McAllen, an Irish-born cattleman who had come to South Texas in the mid-eighteen hundreds, married into the prominent Ballí family, one of the original Spanish grant holders, and built one of the larger ranching operations in the lower Valley.

When railroad promoters needed a route through the region, John McAllen and his son James donated land to secure the line through Santa Anita rather than a rival location. That decision determined where a city would grow. On December fifth, nineteen oh four, a group including John McAllen, James Ballí McAllen, and the railroad men Uriah Lott and Leonidas Hill formed the McAllen Townsite Company. The new community would carry the family name.

The town incorporated in February of nineteen eleven. At that point, roughly one thousand people lived there, farming cotton and alfalfa and early citrus crops on what had been open range just seven years before. Land that had sold for twenty-five cents an acre in nineteen oh three was fetching three hundred dollars an acre by nineteen ten. The railroad had done what railroads always did in that era: it turned geography into commerce, and commerce into towns.

John McAllen died in nineteen thirteen, two years into his city's formal existence, old enough to see what the train he had invited in was building. He was eighty-seven years old.