ARMSTRONG, TEXAS (Kenedy County). Armstrong, a rural community on U.S. Highway 77 twenty miles south of Sarita in west central Kenedy County, is on the Missouri Pacific Railroad, originally constructed here as the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway in 1904. The community was named for Capt. John Barclay Armstrong,^qv who around 1893 founded the Armstrong Ranch two miles northeast of the site. The railroad stop served the ranch as a shipping point. In 1913 a local post office opened under the name Katherine; it was renamed in 1915. The population of Armstrong peaked in 1929 at an estimated twenty-five. In 1948 the settlement had a railroad station, and in 1956 several dwellings were at the site. From 1931 to 1950 the settlement had one business. In 2000 Armstrong was a dispersed community with a post office, an estimated population of twenty, various dwellings, and the railroad station.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frank Cushman Pierce, Texas' Last Frontier: A Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (Menasha, Wisconsin: Banta, 1917; rpt., Brownsville: Rio Grande Valley Historical Society, 1962). Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin.

Alicia A. Garza