Cactus

Cactus is two miles east of Interstate Highway 35 and twenty miles north of Laredo in northern Webb County. The settlement began around 1881 as a shipping point on the International and Great Northern Railroad. A local school enrolled forty-five pupils in 1907, and a post office served area residents from 1884 through 1916. After 1892 the community's reported population never exceeded fifty, and the number of residents had declined to twenty-five by the late 1940s. No population figures were available for Cactus from 1968 through the early 1990s. In the 1980s a combination gas station and grocery, a few scattered dwellings, and a cemetery remained in the vicinity.