01/14/2026
A Little Island History on this dreary Tuesday.
The Ranch House on Packery Channel
By Greg Smith
Around the turn of the century Patrick built a headquarters house for the Dunn Ranch at the head of the Island. The location was just west of the Packery Channel Bridge where folk’s park and fish today and discarded plastic bags decorate the nearby dunes.
The house was not a fancy structure, when originally built it was two story, with the kitchen and dining area on the first floor and sleeping quarters above. It had a three-sided porch running the full length of the Gulf, Island and Packery side of the house. A pier extended from the porch into the channel for boats bringing supplies and passengers from Corpus. Pat being of the economical sort used what wood the beach provided for lumber to build the house and when asked why he built a two story he replied, “not a single saw washed in with the lumber and I had no saw to cut it shorter.”
As time went on, he built a new kitchen and dining hall on the back of the house and added a separate bunk house on the bay side. Patrick and family never used this house as their residence, living in Corpus Christi, but did spend several months of the year there.
Crossing the Laguna
At that time getting to the Island was no easy matter. Coming by sailboat it was a fourteen-mile trip across the bay and then six miles down Corpus Pass. Depending on the wind and currents it could be a three-hour trip or take the whole day. By horse or wagon it was about a six-hour trek, following a route close to where Yorktown Boulevard is, crossing the Oso at Mud Bridge and then fording the Laguna, leaving Flour Bluff around Bluff Landing and coming ashore in the vicinity of Whitecap.
The Laguna before the days of the Intracoastal and Humble channels was two to three feet deep on the Bluff side and less than a foot deep for the last mile to the Island. The ford across the Laguna was a hard sand bottom marked by wooden stakes. Outside of the stakes were soft mud areas that could quickly bog a wagon or animal, turning an easy crossing into a nightmare. In the best case the cattle or horses would thrash their way out, if not then it required roping and pulling them to the hard sand with a team of mules or horses. Occasionally a panicky animal would die, exhausted, from the stress and sinking too far into that stinky blue mud to escape.
Visiting the house
The Packery Channel house served two primary purposes, first a headquarters and jumping off place for working cattle and holding herds before crossing to the mainland, and then as today a getaway vacation spot for the extended Dunn clan and friends. In those pre-air condition times, there was no better place in the Texas summer to be than the Island, almost always a cool breeze coming off the Gulf and a full porch to enjoy it in. With the addition of the bunk house, beds were in plentiful and if they filled up the ranch hands would set up some of the big canvas tents that Pat often used working cattle down Island.
In 1915 a young Bishop school teacher, Buena Vista Hill was invited by one of the Dunn boys to come to the Island. Eager to escape the heat of the coastal plains she joined the party and took the boat trip over from Corpus. For first timers like Buena the surprise tradition was to throw them into the channel off the end of the dock. Arriving at camp she was asked to check out the end of the pier to the suppressed grins and laughter of the boys about to give her the wet surprise. Running out to the end Buena quickly pulled off her dress, reveling a bathing suit underneath and jumped off end of the pier. She merrily asked the now surprised group to join her as she had been forewarned of this prank a few days before. Impressed with this young lass’s humor Patrick’s son Burton Dunn began a romance that would last the next fifty-five years.
