Mirando City

Mirando City is on Ranch Road 649 thirty miles east of Laredo and 110 miles west of Corpus Christi in eastern Webb County. The elevation is 600 feet above sea level. The townsite, on land originally granted to Nicolás Mirando, was previously occupied by a small ranching community. When the Texas-Mexican Railway built through the area in 1881, the community acquired a small siding that enabled it to ship cattle and sheep. In addition to livestock, the area around Mirando City has also long supported the peyote cactus. Webb, Zapata, Jim Hogg, and Starr counties contain the only commercial range of peyote in the United States. Area residents known as peyoteros have harvested and supplied peyote for religious ceremonies to Indians in the United States since the nineteenth century. Indians also travel to Mirando City from across the country to harvest the cactus themselves.

In April 1921 Oliver Winfield Killam brought in the first commercial oil well in the area. Killam, who had already promoted the town of Locust Grove in Oklahoma, bought land in Mirando Valley and started laying out the town of Mirando City in September 1921. Several months later, in December, a gusher at another drilling site ushered in an oil boom. Lots began selling rapidly, and the town quickly became the hub of activity in the oilfield. A post office was established in 1922. Mirando City had the distinction of being one of the few towns established in Texas without a nearby water supply. Until the fall of 1922 all of the drinking water for the town was hauled from the neighboring community of Bruni at a cost of $13.00 per tank car. Two tanks and a pump were furnished by O. W. Killam and located near the Mirando City Lumber Company, which Killam had established earlier that year. Also in 1922, William W. Sterling and John Long organized the first water company in Mirando City. They dug wells in the nearby village of Los Ojuelos, which had flowing springs. The partners then laid a pipeline to Mirando City, constructed a 500-barrel storage tank, and installed the town's first water meters. The heavy water use dropped the water table, however, and the springs at Los Ojuelos dried up. Although deepened several times, the wells themselves dried up in the 1930s, and other wells were drilled farther east to supply Mirando City.