Mirando City, TX

Mirando City is a Webb County census-designated place about 30 miles east of Laredo, in a landscape shaped by ranching, oil, and the Texas-Mexican Railway. The railway established a siding here in 1881, and the community later took its name from Nicolás Mirando, a Spanish land grantee. Oliver Winfield Killam laid out the town in 1921 after drilling South Texas's first commercial oil well; a gusher that December opened the region's oil boom. Webb Consolidated Independent School District and the Ernesto J. Salinas Memorial Community Center remain local institutions.