Socorro, Texas, One of America's Oldest Towns

Socorro, Texas, now a southeastern suburb of El Paso, holds a claim that very few American cities can match: its mission church, La Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora de Socorro, traces its founding to sixteen eighty. Spanish missionaries and Piro Pueblo refugees fleeing the Pueblo Revolt of that year built the original church here, making it one of the oldest active parishes in the United States. The community was originally established on the south bank of the Rio Grande in what is now Mexico, but the river shifted course in eighteen twenty-nine and left Socorro, along with several other old Mexican towns, on the Texas side of the border. The present mission church is at least the third building on the same site, rebuilt after floods and fires, but the congregation and the dedication have never moved.