Texana Thursday: Just How Do You Pronounce Refugio, Anyway?

Refugio City Hall (Wikimedia Commons photo)

Some Texas cities are named in honor of Texas heroes; for example, Austin and Houston. Other city names are for prominent figures of the day; for example, Fort Worth, named for U.S. Army General William Jenkins Worth, and Galveston, named after Bernardo de Galvez y Madrid, the Count of Galvez, in Spain.

Two Texas cities have presidential names. Johnson City wasn’t named for Lyndon B. Johnson, but for his ancestors. Taft, in South Texas, was named for Charles Taft, half-brother of William Howard Taft.

And then there’s Refugio, a pleasant community with a population of approximately 3,000, in South Texas. Refugio is about a 45-minute drive north of Corpus Christi. Baseball fans know it as the birthplace of the Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan. The journalist Joseph L. Galloway, co-author of the Vietnam War memoir, We Were Soldiers Once…And Young (1992), was also born in Refugio.

Refugio goes back a couple of centuries. The site of the present-day city apparently was a favorite camping area for the Karankawa Indians. The Spanish settled the area in the 1700s and established the Nuestra Señora del Refugio Mission there. The town grew up around and near the mission, which itself became secularized.

Refugio was the site of a battle during the Texas Revolution of 1836, between the fall of the Alamo in March and the victory at San Jacinto in April. The battle isn’t remembered—if it’s remembered—as among the great or iconic moments of the revolution.

The battle didn’t turn out well for the Texans because one commander (James Fannin, who would meet his fate at the Battle of Goliad) wanted to see the residents evacuated, and the two commanders on the spot had other ideas. Ultimately people fled the town, leaving it to the advancing Mexican Army.

Like other towns destroyed by the advancing Mexican Army, Refugio had to rebuild itself following the revolution. Many of its residents who were evacuated did not return. The local economy is primarily agriculture-related, though oil was discovered in 1928.

Refugio is a pass-through town for those going to and from Corpus Christi. But it has its place in Texas history, and a unique name that people aren’t sure how to pronounce.

It’s pronounced “ree-fure-eo.”