The war in Vietnam was over and thousands of Vietnamese families were immigrating to the United States as soon as sponsoring families were found. This is the story of one family and how they came to be in the seaport town of Palacios. It was January 1976 and a...
Shrimping our Texas Gulf has been a way of life for the Wallis family since the spring of 1964. Moving to Palacios in 1956, Hugh Wallis became a partner in an outboard motor business with a friend Wallace Barr, whom he met while working for ALCOA. Together they formed...
The Aparicio Family in Palacios The logical place for this story to begin is in the year 1907, in the little village called Barruelo de Santullan, in the northern Spanish province of Palencia. It begins with 23-year-old Isaac Aparicio, anxious to seek a future more...
In the mid-’40s two pre-teen boys were in Palacios along with their father, Santos Garcia. The two boys, Edward and Chencho, found work around the water. Some days were spent shucking oysters, and others in the bay in search of shrimp. The work was hard and...
In the fall of 1918, the Bates’ family moved from Grand Bay, Alabama to Palacios, Texas. This family had been in the fish business in Grand Bay where they caught, processed, and shipped mullet to the East coast markets. They had heard Matagorda Bay had good fishing...
Great Grandfather Fred Bates, Sr. staked out land at “Paul’s Valley” Oklahoma in the 1800s during the great ‘land rush”. This was going to be his family’s home as farmers, but they couldn’t seem to make a living there. After hearing about the good fishing on the coast...
In the early 1920’s the economy of Palacios was largely dependent on the growth of citrus and fig orchards, truck farms and oyster harvesting. In the late 1920’s successive freezes wiped out many of the citrus and fig orchards. About this same time, the young and...
