b'CORPUS CHRISTI HISTORYCIVIL WAR, RECONSTRUCTION AND THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY IN CORPUS CHRISTICorpus Christi served as an important supply depot for the Confederate Army during the Civil War, so much so, that at one point the Union Navy occupied Mustang Island in an effort to blockade shipping into Corpus Christi Bay. For a week in August 1862, what was certainly the mildest battle of the war politely raged after a Union naval patrol in Aransas Bay spotted and chased the CSS Breaker, an armed schooner considered a prize ship for the Confederates. After the Union vessels opened fire, the crew of the Breaker grounded the ship, set it ablaze and escaped into the dunes near what is today Aransas Pass. Union sailors extinguished the fire and captured the schooner, using it later as a hospital ship.Emboldened by the capture of the Breaker, Union vessels moved closer to the Confederate outpost at Corpus Christi known as Fort Kinney, establishing a blockade of shipping traffic in or out. At dawn on August 17th, CSA soldiers manned a cannon battery and opened fire on the Union ships in the bay, which returned fire until the attack was subdued. Once the counter fire stopped for a while, the rebels manned the battery and started firing on the ships againthis cycle repeated several times over the daylight hours of the scorching Sunday in August. The extended distance between combating forces rendered most of their fire inaccurate and ineffective.Seemingly frustrated over their lack of progress from the bay, Union commander Lieutenant John W. Kittredge ordered a midnight land assault of thirty men and a howitzer. The Confederates repelled the attack, and the Union party retreated to their ship. After exhausting their remaining ammunition firing on the fort, but mostly striking shops and homes in the town, the Union ships withdrew to Aransas Bay and back into the Gulf of Mexico. In all, Confederate forces suffered one dead and one wounded with two wounded on the Union side, in what was doubtlessly the mildest battle of the Civil War. About a third of Corpus Christis residents were Union sympathiz-ers, a few of whose homes were looted following their ill-advised, open celebration of the shelling of the city.The first economic boom in the Coastal Bend following the Civil War was in sheep and cattle ranching, and over the 1870s and 1880s, the legendary players in South Texas ranching began to make their namesthe Kings, the Armstrongs and the Welders, among others. The ranching boom was not restricted to food products, far from it, in fact. Wool, tallow, hides, leather and other by-products, along with the services requiredThe first Nueces County to process, package and ship those products,Courthouse, 1887thrived in the Coastal Bend. In the 1870s, the first railroads came to Corpus Christi that would connect to the first steamships wharfed on the bayin 1874, the original channel of eight feet in depth was dredged through Aransas Pass, allowing the ships to navigate from the Gulf of Mexico into Corpus Christi Bay and on to the city.In the 1890s, an ambitious New Yorker named Elihu Ropes came to Corpus Christi with the goal of dredging a deep water chan-nel and establishing a major shipping port. While he did not accomplish his goal, his promotion of the city attracted new business and investment, along with hundreds of new residents. During this period, the city began to modernize with the paving of boulevards, the construction of a railed streetcar line and public water system. The railroads that were bringing so much prosperity to the region via commodities shipping were employed after the turn of the 20th Century to delivery tourists to the beautiful coast of South Texas.With Galveston wiped out by the devastating 1900 Hurricane, a great void was created for seasonal tourism to the Texas Gulf Coast, and developers on North Beach began filling the void. Within a decade, Corpus Christi emerged as the top waterfront destination in the state, with new hotels, pleasure piers, an amusement park and church encampment the size of a small city, all emerging on North Beach. It was even the location of the first Corpus Christi Country Club, where President William Howard Taft played the inaugural round of golf.Sadly, like Galveston experienced two decades earlier, Corpus Christis great progress was halted by Mother Nature, when much of the city and virtually all of the waterfront tourist facilities were destroyed in the 1919 Hur-ricane. Their future uncertain, the hearty residents of the Coastal Bend strode into the Roaring Twenties.TheCoastalBend.com THE COASTAL BEND TOUR+RELO+BUILD GUIDE 43'