(Ed.'s note: Not too many people realize it, but the Brownsville area was home to at least six agricultural plantations that tried growing everything from cotton to sugar cane. The labor, of course was ll local and from across the Rio Grande.
In "Boom an Bust"Milo Kerany and Anthony Knopp write that (Page 172-173):
"Blomberg and Raphael planted long-stem Sea Island cotton their La Leona Ranch in 1886. However, the anti-weevil insecticide disabled pickers' hands, and the third crop, planted on river bottom land, produced no cotton, despite growing a fantastic height of 15 feet, so the attempt was discontinued.
"The few new business entrepreneurs who came into the area brought only minor changes. In 1874, Louis Bruley, a French immigrant from Paris, started a sugar plantation with a sugar mill and, in 1876, the delta's first irrigation system. Sugar cane was also produced at the riverside Palm Grove of Frank Rabb, an ex-baseball player from Corpus Christi married to a daughter of Mifflin Kenedy and Petra Vidal."In 1879, another immigrant from France, Celestin Jagou, bought the Esperanza Ranch five miles east of Brownsville along the Resaca de la Palma, after its owner, Jerry Gavan, had drowned in the Mississippi River. Applying the horticultural techniques he had learned in the French Pyrenees, he experimented with all sorts of crops from long-stemmed Sea Island cotton to silk to bananas and grapes. However, he met with one setback after another.
"The tobacco he grew was made into cigars by a Cuban in Matamoros, but the idea had to be abandoned due to a lack of reliable transportation of the cigars to outside markets.
"In 1891, Jagou planted the first citrus trees in the area. These included orange stock from Florida, lime stock from Mexico and lemon stock from Italy. However, the February 13, 1899, cold snap, down to 12 degrees Fahrenheit, killed all the trees."