Rio Grande City, Texas, Fort Ringgold and the Borderland

Rio Grande City sits on the south bank of the Rio Grande in Starr County, at a spot whose roots trace to a Spanish land grant of seventeen sixty-two. Henry Clay Davis established the town as Rancho Davis in the late eighteen forties, as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made this stretch of the river the international border. Almost immediately, the United States Army established Camp Ringgold on October twenty-sixth, eighteen forty-eight, named for Major Samuel Ringgold, the first American officer to die of wounds received at the Battle of Palo Alto two years earlier.

The fort anchored the town's growth and guarded a key river crossing for decades. Starr County, named for Republic of Texas official James Harper Starr, remains one of the most heavily Hispanic counties in the nation and one of the oldest settled stretches of the US-Mexico border.