About 30 miles from Laredo, just off U.S. Hwy. 359, you can turn onto Ranch Road 649 and find two tranquil places that belie their once teeming historic pasts. One is Los Ojuelos and the other is Mirando City.
Because I have old, longstanding paternal ties to Los Ojuelos, I find that daytrips there always evoke deep wells of thought for who we have been and who we are now. My grandfather Pedro Armengol Guerra was born at Los Ojuelos in 1880 to Adela Aguirre Guerra (from Candela) and José María Guerra.
I feel drawn there as I do to the antiquities of San Ygnacio and Candela.
On a recent outing, I drove through Mirando City and spent some time in the Los Ojuelos cemetery. I marveled at the beautiful, stark simplicity of some of the old memorials and crypts, and I considered just beyond the barbed wire enclosure the juxtaposition of the massive white windpower papalotes that dot the landscape.
Los Ojuelos was once a stop on the Pony Express circuit and on the Laredo-to-Corpus Christi overland trade route. In 1860 the settlement had a population of 400. The number of residents there declined with the construction of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway in 1881.
Back in Mirando City, I took a look at what is left of a place that experienced explosive growth after O.W. Killam’s wildcat successes in the early 1920s. If Mirando’s old buildings could speak, you’d hear volumes about prosperity in a town that had machine shops, including the Border Foundry and the M&S, schools, a lumberyard, an American Legion hall, a pharmacy, a boarding house, and a population that peaked at 1,500 in 1929. A weekly newspaper, The Mirando City Record, published from 1939 to 1941, reaching a circulation high of 1,500.
You won’t drive far without coming across some massive reminders of the town’s oil exploration history. You’ll see the hulks of wooden and steel well spudders and pump jacks. You should not leave Mirando City without having lunch at Lala’s — everyone knows that.
Robert Black’s well-executed website Mirandocity.com provides a wealth of old photos and tells the history of Mirando City’s economic and social life, as well as that of its schools and the people who invested their lives in the growth and well-being of the community. The site gives an overview of the neighboring communities of Aguilares, Los Ojuelos, Bruni, and Oilton and their role in Mirando’s history.
Mirandocity.com includes the history of the peyoteros who have supplied the Native American Church with the sacred hallucinogenic plant.
(FYI: The transcript and recording of a May 7, 1956 interview of O.W. Killam for the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry Records is published at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American history [Reel 183]. It was recorded at Mr. Killam’s office at 1020 Salinas in Laredo. That rare look back to Indian territory and stories from the oilfields is history told by a man who forged it.)
