08/22/2026
FYI
The marker for the town of Copano had to be moved because the town would not stay put. It went up in 1936 on the bluff above Copano Bay, and in 1978 they hauled it five miles inland to Bayside, because the bluff it stood on is falling into the water. The monument outlived the port and then had to retreat from it.
The name goes back to the Copane, a Karankawan people who appear in the records of the missions at Rosario and Refugio between 1751 and 1828. For a long time the story ran that Spain opened a port there in 1722, which is what the centennial marker says. A 2024 revision of the Handbook of Texas takes that apart. Puerto in Spanish also just means a bay or a harbor, a natural feature, and there is no evidence Spain ever opened a working port on that shore. Copano does not turn up in the Bexar Archives until the mid 1820s.
What is not in doubt is how much came through once it did. Juan Almonte, inspecting Texas for Santa Anna in 1834, reported Copano to have the deepest port in Texas. Irish colonists came ashore there through the early 1830s and it went hard for many of them; one party out of New York was hit with cholera and a number of those people reached Texas only to be buried on the Copano beach. In September of 1835 General Cos landed his army there on his way to Goliad and Bexar, and when the Texans took Goliad that October they cut him off from the port and starved him into surrender. Houston ordered Copano fortified. Texans held it as a port of entry into the following spring, and Fannin came ashore there in February of 1836 with about two hundred men.
The town itself came later. Settlement started around 1840, and by 1852 there were a dozen houses, a school, two stores, three wharves and a post office. Every one of those houses was shellcrete, made from the shell lying right there on the beach. It got through the Civil War better than most Gulf ports, because ships could load there without being watched. And then it simply lost. The railroads never came, no matter how many times somebody tried to connect it to Goliad or San Antonio, and there was never enough fresh water. People moved over to Refugio. By the 1880s Copano was empty.
What is left is shellcrete ruins and two cemeteries on a ten foot bluff that keeps giving way. A field school out of Texas A&M Kingsville found ten houses and a cistern right on the edge of that cliff and concluded they would not be there much longer. The shoreline has come in about a hundred feet since 1935. It is private property with no public road to it, so the closest anybody gets is that marker, five miles off, standing where it can.
