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Jun 27, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
Time is running out on an exhibit that features Victoria’s founding story, 170 miles northeast of the Crossroads at the “Gateway to Texas.”Galveston’s Bryan Museum, operated in the historic Galveston Orphanage Home built in 1895, is featuring an exhibition entitled “Tejanos of Revolutionary Texas” through July 7.
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May 19, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
The Victoria Advocate — then styled the Texan Advocate, and later the Texian Advocate — published its first newspaper 178 years ago this month. Founders John D. Logan and Thomas Sterne left a less-profitable newspaper venture in Van Buren, Arkansas, early in 1846, and brought their printing operation down to Victoria, Henry Wolff Jr. wrote in a 1996 Advocate article.
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May 10, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
The history of European settlement in Texas began in 1686 on the banks of Garcitas Creek in what would become Victoria County. There, a dogged French explorer unlawfully settled a small ill-fated colony in what was New Spain. An ancestor of Victoria’s founding family led the search, up from Mexico, to root out the foreign trespassers, but, finding the colony destroyed by Indigenous people, they rescued the few surviving children from captivity among the Karankawas.
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May 3, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
Back more than 100 years ago, when broom-making was big business, Victoria got in on the action. A group of “over 100 hard-working, law-abiding Vikings” were among those in South Texas who grew the bi-color sorghum — called broomcorn — used to make brooms. They, and others, sent the harvested sorghum to broom factories in Victoria, Goliad and Beeville, which turned the crop into stiff, wooden-handled straw brooms — an item in high-demand back in the late 1800s and well into the 1900s.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
The Victoria County Courthouse and America’s first known serial killer are linked, albeit by a few degrees of separation. The architect who designed the courthouse, built in 1892, also designed the Texas Pavilion for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as noted by historian Henry Wolff Jr., in a June 28, 1992, Victoria Advocate article. The exposition ran for six months and drew in over 27 million visitors — and one killer who used the fair as a hunting ground.
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
At a February lecture she gave at the Victoria Public Library, Blanche De Leon shared what she called a “bit of juicy information” with the audience. She revealed to the group of about 60 listeners exactly what the bicentennial statue of founder Martin De Leon is pointing at. The statues, which are being cast in bronze at a foundry north of San Antonio, are of Martin and Patricia De Leon, Victoria’s founders.
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Feb 11, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
Martin and Patricia De Leon’s children would bear them about 22 grandchildren, many of whom lived in the Victoria area. Most were landowners, recouping family land after the Texas Revolution-era exile. Some earned reputations as rowdies. Almost all endured “racist sneers,” wrote Ana Carolina Castillo Crimm, a historian and expert on the DeLeon family. One grandson, Silvestre, fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and was taken prisoner.
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Jan 18, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads. West and north of San Antonio is the Balcones Escarpment, a fault line above which sits the Edwards Plateau — vast southern prairies and canyons, once teeming with bison and controlled by the Pehnahterkuh, the “Honey Eaters,” the southernmost grouping of the fearsome Comanches.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads. The Street of Ten Friends, La Calle de los Diez Amigos, now Main Street, was intersected by streets named for friends of the fledgling colony of Victoria, founded in 1824 by Martin De Leon. “The only names on the Street of Ten Friends that lived here were De Leon and (Rafael Antonio) Manchola.
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Dec 15, 2023 | 
victoriaadvocate.com | Tamara Díaz
Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads. After the American Civil War, for about 10 years from 1865-1875, the counties of the Crossroads were covered in large part by what Victor Rose called “the bloody hand.” Goliad County was especially drenched.
