After the horrific flood of 1954, which knocked down the west wall of our modest two-room house at 402 San Pablo Avenue (our house was across the street from Zacate Creek), we ended up living at 210 Iturbide Street.
In 1958, we moved to a very old six-room stone house with a long screen porch at 801 Zaragoza Street, at the corner of Zaragoza and Santa Ursula, and adjacent to the American Legion Post 59.
The original rectangular stone house, built around the late 1790s or early 1800s, consisted of four small rooms, all in a row, with very high ceilings and walls about two-feet thick.
The house, which fronted Zaragoza Street had only one window and three double wooden doors eight-feet high. The east wall also only had one window. One of the doors was remodeled into a modern door in the 1930s, along with the addition of a bathroom, kitchen, the screen porch, and the floor. At the rear of the house was a small backyard on a very high cliff overlooking the Río Grande and Nuevo Laredo.
I was in the eighth grade when we moved in. My mother would tell me that she had heard stories from the neighbors and from the previous tenants that General Antonio López de Santa Anna had slept in that house on his way to San Antonio in 1836. Not knowing any better, naturally I believed my mother, and consequently, I told my classmates this fantastic story.
It was not until I was attending St. Mary’s University, studying and cataloguing the Laredo Archives under the tutelage and supervision of Miss Carmen Perry that I found out differently. General Santa Anna could not have stayed in Laredo and in our house in 1836 because when he went to San Antonio de Bejar to fight at the Alamo, he did not travel through Laredo. He went to San Antonio de Bejar by way of the Upper Camino Real from Mexico City to San Luis Potosí, Saltillo, Monclova, Presidio del Río Grande (close to Eagle Pass),and then to San Antonio de Bejar.
However, 23 years earlier, in 1813, General Joaquin de Arredondo and his army stayed in Laredo for a few days and he took the Lower Camino Real to San Antonio de Bejar. In General Arredondo’s army was a young lieutenant by the name of Antonio López de Santa Anna. It is plausible that when General Arredondo and his army spent the nights in Laredo, they could have stayed in the house and in the other stone houses close to and surrounding the Plaza de San Agustín. Afterwards, the Royalist Army under the command of General Joaquin de Arredondo marched towards San Antonio de Bejar and confronted the Republican Army of General José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois on August 18, 1813 at the battle of the Medina.
Regrettably, in the mid-1980s, our old house was demolished to make room for a parking lot. Otherwise, the house would still be standing and it would have been included as an important part of the Villa de San Agustín Historic District, which encompasses the area where the house once stood.
(J. Gilberto Quezada is a retired public school administrator, an award-winning author, writer, novelist, essayist, and poet. His political biography, Border Boss: Manuel B. Bravo and Zapata County, published by Texas A&M University Press in 1999 received the prestigious Texas Institute of Letters Award, the Webb County Heritage Foundation Award, and the American Association for State and Local History Award.)
