In 1861, Jackson County voted for secession 147 to 77. With its beef and cotton, it helped supply the South. It furnished salt from beds near Cox's Creek, hides and tallow from a plant between Port Lavaca and Texana, and lead from the Navidad mine, now a lost mine. People at home molded bullets and sent them to fighting men, along with clothes woven, sewed, or knitted by the family. Couriers operated along a line that skirted the blockade coast from the mouth of Caney Creek to Brownsville. The home guard kept enemy ships off the shores, and a Confederate gunboat, chased from Lavaca Bay, sank in the Navidad.