Land on the Atascosa River had first been allocated in the 1700s as a ranch for Mission San Jose in San Antonio, twenty miles north, but was left unsettled in the 1820s. In 1828 Jose Antonio Navarro, a prominent San Antonio resident, asked the governor of the Mexican state for four leagues of pasture land and officially received the grant in 1831, although he may have occupied the ranch earlier. In 1836 he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and for some years afterward his business and political responsibilities kept him elsewhere. By 1853 he had centered his ranching interests here and spent summers in a log house overlooking the Atascosa River. He registered his cattle brand in Atascosa County in 1856 and donated land for a county seat in 1857, though the seat moved to Pleasanton in 1858. The 1860 census recorded 400 cattle, 200 swine, 35 horses, and 12 oxen on the ranch, which covered almost 18,000 acres. Oil was noted on the land as early as 1867. After the Civil War Navarro turned the ranch over to his sons, and after his death in 1871 in San Antonio, the property was divided among his five children. The acreage remained in the family until his son Sixto Eusebio Navarro sold the old ranch home in 1894.