Mathis, Texas

Mathis exists because of a railroad and a rancher. In eighteen eighty-seven, when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway was being surveyed through San Patricio County, Thomas H. Mathis owned roughly sixty thousand acres in the area.

He donated three hundred acres for a townsite and offered a lot to any church that would build. The town that took his name grew slowly through the ranching economy of the South Texas brush country. The bigger change came in the early nineteen thirties, when Lake Corpus Christi was impounded on the Nueces River four miles away.

The Wesley Seale Dam raised the lake level further in nineteen fifty-nine, and the lakeside economy that followed gave Mathis a second identity as a gateway for fishing and recreation along one of the largest reservoirs in South Texas.