San Ygnacio: The Fort on the Rio Grande

San Ygnacio is one of the oldest towns in Texas, settled in eighteen thirty by Jesús Treviño and a group of families from across the Rio Grande. Treviño built a fortified sandstone compound, a hundred by a hundred and forty feet, that doubled as a home and a defensive refuge during a time when the borderlands were anything but safe.

The Uribe family later took over the rancho, expanded the compound, and became a leading family of the town. Today that compound, known as the Treviño-Uribe Rancho, is a National Historic Landmark, and San Ygnacio's historic district preserves thirty-six stone buildings in the same style as those of old Revilla, the Mexican sister town that was later swallowed by Falcon Reservoir. It is the last South Texas community with a collection of nineteenth-century sandstone vernacular architecture this intact.