HACIENDITA, TEXAS. Haciendita (Haciendito) is on Farm Road 170 and the Rio Grande, six miles northwest of Presidio in southwestern Presidio County. Irrigation and cotton growing were introduced to the area in 1917, when Don Bartello Garcia built a gravity irrigation system to serve the community's farmers. Garcia sold the ditches and their water rights in 1921 to J. H. Fortner, a local cotton farmer. With irrigation, members of the Haciendita community cultivated 1,500 acres of cotton in the 1920s. The community established a school before 1904, when H. H. Lovett taught there; D. Chesser was the teacher in 1908. The community's population was about twenty in 1948. At the close of the 1980s Haciendita was still a small farming community.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: John Ernest Gregg, History of Presidio County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1933). Cecilia Thompson, History of Marfa and Presidio County, 1535-1946 (2 vols., Austin: Nortex, 1985).

Julia Cauble Smith