Laredo vanished from the international map of cactus when Anna B. Nickels closed the Arcadia Gardens in 1907 and moved to live with her son Ben Ells in San Luis Potosí. It was the end of an era.
Still, the peyote hills east of town along the Bordas Escarpment in Oilton and Mirando City would continue to be holy ground for harvesting sacramental plants for the Native American Church. Tribes from the Midwest and Arizona would never stop sending harvesters down every year.
If not on the hills, at least in the minds of the international collectors of succulents, cactus and Laredo went their separate ways for 25 years.
With Nickels’ mail-order catalog out of print and her celebrated outlet on Matamoros Street closed, collectors shopped elsewhere for cactus specimens. Most of the business went to Albert Blanc’s large greenhouse nursery in Philadelphia. His catalog had thousands of cactus varieties for sale and the best illustrations. Nickels herself had copied Blanc’s engraving of an Anhalonium fissuratus (now known as Ariocarpus fissuratus) for the cover of her 1897 cactus seed catalog.
Some of the cactus tourism that Nickels’ operation had attracted to Laredo was diverted toward the west.
In 1883, the Southern Pacific Railroad opened its El Paso to L.A. route across the Gadsden Purchase lands of southern New Mexico and Arizona. The population of the Southwest exploded, and new enterprises to supply horticultural fads appeared in Southern California and Arizona. In order to sell to distant customers, these desert flora suppliers issued catalogs, too. Demand for these species as landscaping ornamentals exploded: uncontrolled poaching of cactus along the highways was so bad that broad areas of roadside desert were left as pot-holed cactus wastelands so that wealthy Angelinos could flaunt eye-catching succulent specimens in their new homes’ front yards.
After Nickels’ cactus business shut down, no succulents were shipped from Laredo.
While Laredo was not the cactus mecca it had been when the Arcadia Gardens was famous, it was not as though the cactus itself had disappeared. On the contrary, it was only the commercial exploitation of cactus from the South Texas and northern Mexico monte that went dormant.
But one spinster school teacher, Miss Emma Cummings, continued planting attractive cactus varieties for her friends around town. In a reminiscence five years after her death, a 1929 Laredo Times writer characterized Cummings “a lover of cacti and its kindred plants” and called her the local successor to the pioneering work of Anna B. Nickels.
Cummings is remembered now (if at all) only as a notable figure in the early history of Laredo primary education, especially for her school on the corner of Houston and Davis, a lot where the new section of St. Peter’s School would be built in the 1920s. Many children of Laredo’s first families in the city’s new turn-of-the-century elite neighborhood began school there. Among the students was Alma B. Pierce, daughter of Charles Pierce, a local politician and Texas State Representative. Pierce would graduate from the University of Texas and have a long career as a teacher at Martin High. For that service, she is honored with an elementary school named after her.
The Times article mentions that “Many Laredoans have cereus, the interesting tall night-blooming varieties, which were given them by Miss Cummings, among them may be mentioned Mrs. A. Siros, Mrs. John Convery, and the late Mrs. C. C. Pierce.”
We do not know how Cummings had accumulated enough cereus varieties to give friends and mothers of her students in the St. Peter’s neighborhood.
Did she have a greenhouse?
Did she lace up tall rattlesnake boots and go out into the ranchlands collecting as Anna Nickels had?
The three Laredo landscape gardens mentioned in the Times article are long gone. The Siros’ home on 1403 Hidalgo and the Pierce’s at 1110 Matamoros were razed not long after for commercial development. Only the house built by John Convery, one of Laredo’s first undertakers, is still standing. At 1720 Matamoros, unfortunately, most of its original garden has been paved for client parking. None of Mrs. Convery’s cereus has survived the residence-to-office conversion.
Laredo has a lamentably long list of old gardens that have disappeared over time. Some historic houses have been restored, but unlike two-story monuments in stone or brick, run-down gardens left untended cannot be brought back to life. The plantings have all died or been dug up, and Miss Cummings’ cereus gifts, which would be over a century old now, are lost forever.
Even so, idle Laredo daydreamers wistfully conjure up images of 125-yr.-old cactus specimens in the forgotten gardens of run-down houses near St. Peter’s, survivors –or, if “the biggest pest in the garden is the gardener,” perhaps the beneficiaries— of decades of neglect and winter cold snaps.
Emma Cummings was already mostly forgotten at the end of her life. Alma Pierce’s mother, Josefa Paz Pierce, an old friend and neighbor, signed Cummings’ death certificate and provided vital statistics. She guessed that Cummings was “around 80.” A lifetime spent as a teacher can be a hard one. Miss Cummings may have looked 80, but she was only 61.
Cummings’ enduring legacy is now limited to the memory of the literacy of a generation a hundred years ago, the grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s Laredoans. We look back amazed at its —and our— history.
Only with the commercial success of the Shiner Cactus Nursery on the corner of Market and Bartlett in the early-1930s did cactus gardeners begin to take notice of Laredo again. Margaret Sackville Jones, who was married to George Shiner in the glory days of their husband-and-wife cactus nursery, went on to establish the succulent nursery and café on San Bernardo that many of us remember as the Cactus Garden Café.
After its founding in 1928, the Shiner Cactus Nursery had a large, nationwide customer base and was a local tourist attraction for a decade. Its mail-order catalog illustrated with photographs and including detailed essays on caring for cactus in collections was widely disseminated. Copies of the Shiner Cactus catalog are important documents in government and academic horticultural archives.
Margaret Sackville, Mrs. Shiner, was the cactus expert of the growing business, supervising the propagation and grafting of imported species worldwide. She wrote the copy for the catalogs. In addition, she managed the staff of three gardeners caring for the 3000 cactus plants in the nursery.
In newspaper articles, she is cited as the authority on the identification of species and their cultivation. When the 300 delegates of the Texas Academy of Sciences came to their 1934 congress in Laredo, it was Mrs. Shiner who led them on a guided tour of the operation on Market Street.
Directors of scientific cactus gardens from North and South America as well as Europe were regular visitors. Taxi drivers working the train depots recognized those professorial types and knew to drive them across town to the cactus nursery and Mrs. Shiner.
Lophophora williamsii, peyote, was one of the species cultivated and sold at the Shiner Cactus Nursery. Although the catalogs mention the use of peyote in the religious practices of Native American peoples, the cactus is presented as a pink-blossomed, ornamental collector’s item:
However, by the end of the decade, Sackville’s marriage to Shiner had been dissolved, and she’d married Augustus “Pappy” Jones. Now known as Margaret Sackville Jones and shunned by Laredo polite society as a divorcée, she moved what was left of the Shiner Cactus Nursery plant stock to 3201 San Bernardo, where she set up a greenhouse and Mr. Jones ran the kitchen at the Cactus Garden Café.
This hybrid restaurant/pre-Columbian artifacts museum/gift shop/cactus nursery was the much-loved institution presided over by Sackville Jones that is remembered so fondly by older Laredoans, some of whom got their first lessons in succulent species identification from the venerable plantswoman.
In 1942, Sackville Jones’ newly-wed daughter was killed with her dashing Army pilot husband in a one-car automobile accident in Florida. There would be no heir for the Cactus Garden Café.
Margaret Sackville Jones was one of Laredo’s great cactus experts, all of them women. She died in 1984. Without her, the historic Cactus Garden suffered a long, slow demise and was eventually demolished to create a parking lot for an Auto Zone franchise. Who knows what ever happened to the first-rate collection of cactus Sackille Jones had cared for there for over 40 years?
Like so much else in a Laredo that once existed with it’s own unique identity and character, the Cactus Gardens Café corner is now just another generic American street scene, a site that you might run across anywhere from San Diego to Jacksonville.
Nowadays, the corner at 3201 San Bernardo is another depressing example of the sort of place George Trow referred to so memorably as “in the context of no context.”
With the passing of Sackville Jones and the demise of her cactus nursery, Laredo faded again from the American cactus map where it has languished for the past 35 years.
But this is only a partial truth.
Laredo has always been an important destination for Native Americans who use peyote sacramentally in their worship.
Throughout the early years of the 20th century, the Laredo Times regularly reported on the annual visits of harvesters from the reservations who were passing through on their way to and from the rich peyote fields.
A typical note from January 1913 uses the accepted language of the day:
A party of full-blooded Comanche Indians, consisting of six braves, two squaws and two papooses, arrived in the city yesterday afternoon from Bruni, Torrecillas and other points on the Texas-Mexican where they had been gathering peyote plants. The Indians came from the reservation near Ada, Oklahoma, and after spending the evening here left this morning en route to their Oklahoma homes.
The matter-of-fact tone and absence of explanatory phrases shows how unremarkable for Laredo readers was peyote harvesting in the area by Native Americans from distant reservations.
On the other hand, a note from three years later treats peyote as an unfamiliar plant whose use by Native Americans needed explaining:
The party of Cheyenne Indians who come to this section annually and go to the country near Hebbronville to spend several days gathering a plant known as “peyote,” from which is made a favorite Indian beverage, and report says a smoking article also, arrived in Laredo yesterday.
This morning the three Indians and two squaws left on the Texas-Mexican road for Hebbronville, from where they go to the place near there where the peyote is said to be plentiful. The Cheyenne Indian tribe in Oklahoma semi-annually send Indians to this section to gather their favorite plant, and in consequence Laredo each February and September sees these Red Men her on their way to the Hebbronville section.
By the 1930s, the peyote harvesters were arriving in automobiles.
Laredo’s location on the edge of the most significant peyote habitat in the United States has always been well-known. None of the colorful articles that regularly appear in the Texas Monthly or the New York Times about peyoteros, whether hippies, Native Americans, or families from Mirando City, ever neglects to mention Laredo as a jumping-off-place.
The arc of the peyote chronicle you’ve been reading here (patiently, thank you) can also be seen from the historical perspective of transportation.
Quanah Parker had his “Road to Damascus” conversion moment near Laredo in 1884 when he was cured of a blood infection or, according to another legend, he was gored by a bull in a horseback herding accident and was restored to health by a local curandera. Before the completion of the railroads from Corpus Christi and San Antonio to Laredo, transportation of passengers and merchandise was limited to mules, burros, wagons, and horseback. Or human porters. The archaeological sites with evidence of peyote use far from South Texas were supplied by women and men carrying the dried buttons as trade in bags on their backs or over their shoulders.
The first railroads to Laredo in the early 1880s made possible the speedy distribution of cactus and the new cash crop of Bermuda onions over a much wider area. Anna B. Nickels shipped three boxcars of her inventory by rail to the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair of 1893. Smaller railroad containers took cactus specimens to scientists and museums around the country. Native Americans from Oklahoma traveled to the station at Oilton on Tex Mex trains and shipped dried peyote in barrels from the loading dock there.
There were few automobiles, and ever fewer passable roads, until the 1930s. Then, road building and improvements in auto technology opened up more accessible access to the peyote fields. At the same time the mass production of automobiles created a new kind of tourist industry. Margaret Sackville’s Cactus Gardens Café was in the middle of a highway “motor court” strip that had built up quickly as American families took off on adventures in Fords and Chevys down the Pan American Highway.
From the 30s on, Laredo Times reports usually mention that the Native Americans from distant reservations were traveling by car, sometimes with a note of surprise at the expensive models they were driving.
As the American interstate highways were punched through the ranchlands and cities, driving habits changed, and so did Laredo.
Traffic was diverted to Interstate 35, Winnebagos appeared, and gas prices soared in the 70s. The quaint little motels on palm-lined San Bernardo never recovered their economic viability.
Laredoans of a certain age can cruise up San Bernardo in our imaginations, just by reading this list of names: Virginia Courts, Graf’s Motel, Evelyn Motor Inn, El Cortez Motel, Pan American Courts, Alamo Courts, Laredo Courts Motel, Siesta Motel, and Frontier Motel, most of them only memories or online postcard images now.
Those old motor courts we knew were already on their last legs in the 60s, and they were bulldozed and replaced over the years by fast food and hotel franchises. In the new commercial reality of the age of NAFTA, there was no longer a place for a quirky character like Margaret Sackville Jones or a retro Cactus Gardens Café.
With the death of Sackville Jones the next-to-last chapter of the Laredo succulent story came to an end.
After 1986, the only cactus that mattered was peyote.
Notes:
For a photograph of Emma Cummings’ schoolchildren, see Jerry Thompson, Laredo. A Pictorial History (expanded 3rd ed. 2017), p. 228.
There is a fond reminiscence of Margaret Sackville Jones in María Eugenia Guerra, Historic Laredo (2001), pp. 31-32.
