Natalia developed in close connection with the Medina Valley Irrigation Company Project, later known as the Bexar, Medina, Atascosa Water Control and Improvement District No 1. Named for the daughter of Dr. Fred S. Pearson, the chief engineer who designed and built Medina Dam, the town was envisioned as the “Queen City of the Southwest.” It was laid out on the main line of the Missouri Pacific Railroad and the old International and Great Northern Highway, twenty-eight miles southwest of San Antonio. In August 1912, Natalia served as a commissary site for the irrigation project, and the first parcels of irrigated land and town lots went on sale, with twenty-seven lots sold on the first day. Designed as a modern community, it featured a forty-thousand-dollar hotel, macadamized streets, electric lights, and water works, and its east-west streets were named for principal engineers of the Medina Dam project. In 1931, the Griggs Canning Company built a canning plant to make use of the area’s year-round vegetable growing season; employing five hundred people and operating twenty-four hours a day, it canned spinach, beets, tomatoes, sauerkraut, hominy, and pickles, and it became the first canning plant in Texas to can green beans. Natalia’s boom ended when IH 35 opened in the late 1960’s and bypassed the downtown area, but the town was again working to fulfill its long-held title as the “Queen City of the Southwest.”