Padre's Visionary

Padre Island has a long and dramatic history full of ship wrecks, cannibalistic Indians, and civil war legends. Those delightful stories are a bit off the subject matter of real estate.  There is a bit of overlooked real estate history in our past, though. We owe much to the very first man with a vision for Padre. One of our forefathers was indeed a developer--a developer with a dream larger than any of us present developers could even fathom. 

John L Tompkins was a former World War I fighter pilot who became a real estate agent. He first worked in Corpus Christi and eventually found his way to the then pristine beaches of South Padre Island sometime in the early 50’s. In those years, Padre had little more than a few unoccupied fishing shacks and sand dunes. This was before the causeway, city street plat, or any utilities. It was a deserted island back then, but he saw a thriving resort town.

Tompkins eventually obtained title to five miles of the beachfront on the southern part of the island.  Establishing ownership was a challenge, but he preservered and eventually began selling island lots. In 1955 a beachfront lot was $1,250 and a residential lot $250.

John Tompkins was an aggressive marketer and published something called the “Padre Beach News”, a crystal ball look into the Padre Beach of the future. According to his artist’s conception, sometime between 1960 and 1970 our island would become a resort city of major international importance. His drawing is covered with homesites, beachfront high rises, and bayside resorts. His projected time frame was off by ten plus years as the boom of the 1980’s was really when the island saw high rise development and intense construction of anything other than stilt houses. Still, though, his vision was surprisingly accurate in many ways.

His efforts attracted the attention of a Connecticut investor named Jonathan H. Conrow. It was Conrow who bought a 32 mile piece of the island and worked on its development.

Tompkins died 1979, soon after the causeway was completed in 1974. Then came the hotels and restaurants that began to flesh out the Padre map of his vision. It makes me wonder how much of that progress came of the work of this loudspoken promoter of Padre Island. He never got rich off his “Padre Beach”, but chances are we are richer for his efforts.