Las Minas: South Texas Coal Country
Near Laredo, Texas
Long before South Texas became synonymous with oil, miners here dug cannel coal from the Santo Tomas field. Beginning in the eighteen seventies and eighties, companies sank shafts into the Webb County brush country and a cluster of mining towns grew up around the mine entrances. Collectively called Las Minas, the settlements housed workers who hauled a high-quality, gas-rich coal used for lighting fuel and locomotive power.
The field operated for nearly six decades, closing in nineteen thirty-nine as cheaper fuels made coal mining here uneconomical. Today the scrub has reclaimed most of what was once a working industrial landscape, leaving this marker as one of the few reminders that the borderland under your wheels once ran on coal.
