La Lomita: The Little Hill by the River
Near Mcallen, Texas
Three miles south of the highway, where Farm Road ten-sixteen follows the last low ground before the river, a small stone chapel sits on a rise above the floodplain. The rise is gentle, barely a bump in the landscape, but in a region this flat it was notable enough that a rancher named José Antonio Cantú, who received the land from Spain in seventeen seventy, named his property for it. La Lomita. The little hillock.
A French merchant named René Guyard purchased the land in eighteen fifty-one. He was a devout Catholic in a region where priests were rare and spread across enormous distances. In eighteen sixty-five, Guyard built a small chapel on the site and used it for services. In eighteen seventy-one, he bequeathed the property to the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a religious order that had come to South Texas to serve the scattered ranching families along the river.
For the Oblates, La Lomita became the heart of what they called the Cavalry of Christ, not a military term but a description: priests on horseback riding circuits through the brush country, saying mass at remote ranches, baptizing children, administering last rites. The chapel served roughly sixty-five area ranches and served as a rest stop and resupply point for the traveling missionaries. A flood in eighteen ninety-nine damaged the original structure, and it was rebuilt using stone hauled from the surrounding hills.
The Oblates added a rectory, a guest house, a blacksmith shop, and a buggy shed over the years. La Lomita was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-four and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five. In twenty-nineteen, a congressional budget provision protected it from border wall construction that would have enclosed the grounds.
It still stands. Mass is still said here. The river is a short walk away.
