Aransas County, 1947
Placed in official use on February 18, 1948, this colorful map is the current official county map of Aransas County in the records of the Texas General Land Office. The site of human habitation for over 8,000 years, the area that now forms Aransas County was once populated by nomadic Karankawas, Coahuiltecans, and other indigenous groups. Alonzo Álvarez de Pineda and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, two sixteenth-century Spanish explorers, were the first recorded Europeans in this area, which they claimed for Spain. The Spanish Crown took little interest in this part of their empire until Frenchman René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle landed in 1685 and established his short-lived colony along the Texas Gulf Coast.
Anglo-Americans settled the area in the nineteenth century as part of the Power and Hewetson empresario grant issued by the Mexican government on June 11, 1828, the purpose of which was to promote the immigration of Irish and Mexican families to the state of Coahuila y Tejas. After its independence from Mexico, the Republic of Texas encouraged continued growth of the area with the establishment of a customs house at the town of Lamar.[1] Aransas County was created in 1871 out of Refugio County and is reportedly named for a Spanish outpost in Texas called Rio Nuestra Señora de Aranzazu.[2]
The map’s creator, Eltea Armstrong, was a prolific draftswoman. During her tenure at the Land Office, she drew over 70 county maps, many of which are still in use today. Armstrong’s hallmark style, as seen on this map, fused functional professionalism with artistic flourishes in a “stippling” style, which used small dots of ink to simulate varying degrees of shading and optical color-blending. Her lettering work is both easy to read and aesthetically pleasing and her subtle use of color helps to contextualize this geographically busy coastal county. Marshy areas are reflected using green vegetation symbols, and county boundaries, as well as the cities of Lamar, Fulton, and Rockport, are shown in red.
Armstrong used an orange-yellow ink to highlight the boundaries of the Aransas Migratory Waterfowl Refuge. Now called the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, this 54,829-acre area includes “scattered blackjack oak woodlands, fresh and saltwater marshes, ponds, and coastal grasslands on the mainland as well as 56,668 acres on Matagorda Island.” The Refuge is part of the Central Flyway, an area reaching from Arctic Canada southward, that provides winter roosts for over 300 species of birds and nearly 40 different mammals. [3]
Armstrong often incorporated an artistic image relative to the county on many maps she created. For Aransas County, a county known not for large population centers but its plentiful coastal natural resources, she included a spotted seatrout, also known as a speckled trout. Abundant in the Gulf Coast waters of Aransas County, and favorite of fishers of the coastal bend, the average spotted trout weighs five pounds and is one of the top ten species for recreational fishing in the United States.[4]
[1] For more on the Power and Hewetson Colony see Handbook of Texas Online, “Power and Hewetson Colony,” accessed December 01, 2016, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/uep03.
[2] http://texasalmanac.com/topics/government/aransas-county; http://www.stxmaps.com/go/rockport-fulton-area-history.html; For more on the naming of American counties see Charles Curry Aiken and Joseph Nathan Kane, The American Counties: Origins of County Names, Dates of Creation, Area, and Population Data, 1950–2010, 6th Edition, (Lantham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012).
[3] For more on the wildlife refuge see Handbook of Texas Online, Diana J. Kleiner, “Aransas National Wildlife Refuge,” accessed December 02, 2016, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/gka03
[4] The spotted seatrout, Cynoscion nebulosus is not actually a member of the trout family, but that of the drum. For more on the spotted seatrout see http://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/species/strout/
