Battle of Los Patricios marked Civil War clash near Premont

A new historical marker in Premont has put the Battle of Los Patricios back on Jim Wells County’s map, adding the brush-country clash to the Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail. The battlefield sat in dense mesquital with no public access for more than 160 years, which is why the site stayed obscure even as the history around it remained close to home.

UTRGV places the fight on March 13, 1864, at 7:30 a.m., about four miles west of modern-day Premont along what is now FM 716. Col. John S. “Rip” Ford was advancing to recapture South Texas from Union forces in the Lower Rio Grande Valley when Capt. Matthew Nolan ran head-on into Union guerrillas led by Cecilio Valerio. After the clash, Nolan pulled back to his camp on San Fernando Creek.

The site sits inside a larger borderlands story that stretched across the South Texas border region from Brownsville to Laredo. The Rio Grande was a major point of contention during the Civil War, and the trail’s broader context includes Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, which UTRGV identifies as the site of the war’s last land battle. Los Patricios shows that the conflict did not stay at the river line. It reached inland brush country and the ranchlands around Premont.

The Texas State Historical Association traces that fight to Cecilio Balerio, a rancher and horse-and-mule trader at Corpus Christi in the 1850s who remained loyal to the United States when the war began. Edmund J. Davis enlisted Balerio to strike Confederate cotton trains between Corpus Christi and the lower Rio Grande Valley, and U.S. Navy vessels off Padre Island supplied his men with gold coin, munitions and clothing. TSHA says Balerio’s son Juan was captured in March 1864 and later led about eighty men to the Los Patricios encampment. In TSHA’s account, five of Balerio’s men were found dead after the ambush.

At the marker unveiling on Friday, May 1, 2026, historian Homera Vera said, “The civil war did have an impact here in South Texas,” and added, “People died here, close to 200 men fought here.” Roseann Bacha-Garza of the UTRGV CHAPS Program said the marker preserves a moment that has been largely absent from the historical record. Vera also said the site had been hidden for over 160 years, and local ranchers have found Civil War-era bullets and other artifacts nearby.

Marcos Flores said he hopes the marker will raise awareness in local schools and help people connect the war to their own families and neighborhoods. For Premont and the rest of Jim Wells County, the challenge now is making Los Patricios a place that can be taught, marked and preserved before the brush swallows its story again.