Gardendale, Texas, La Salle County. (original) (raw)

History in a Pecan Shell

Gardendale was a planned agricultural community developed by a San Antonio developer in 1908 to take advantage of the newly irrigated acreage in South Texas.

With rail connections on both the International-Great Northern and the San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf railroads, the success of the 16,000 acre project seemed assured.

Newspaper ads lured farmers from the Midwest with land priced at around $25 per acre. The community, with its appealing name, was granted a post office in 1909. By 1914, the town still had only twenty-five people which slowly grew to seventy-five by the mid 1920s.

But even though the land was irrigated, many of the farmers plots were too small to be viable. Caught between the inadequate plots and the Great Depression, many farms failed.

The town lost its school in the mid-1940s and whatever lone business remained had closed by the mid 1960s. The designation of �ghost town� had been applied by a La Salle county historian, although the population of fifty-nine (given in 1975) wasn�t too far off the peak population of the 1920s. The population was still given as fifty-nine for the 1990 census.

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