Lot 240

Thick mesquite is what this tract does best, and it does it corner to corner. Call it what it is: 27.63 acres of ranch land for sale on Tortuga Ranch in Duval County, grown up in mesquite and huisache dense enough that a man afoot loses the horizon in ten steps. Deer bed in stuff like this. Quail work the ragged edges of it, and the tract is shaped to give you plenty of edge, because it lies narrow and drawn out, near two and a half times as far as it is wide. If you want a place the game already uses instead of a place you have to teach them to use, start with this one.

The terrain isn't flat. It lifts around 43 ft across the tract, 654 ft at the low end rising to 697 ft, and that rise is what you feel underfoot before you ever see it. Enough tilt to shed water into the low spots. Enough to put a stand where a deer coming up the slope shows himself before he winds you. Under the canopy the dirt carries prickly pear, silver-leafed cenizo, and bunchgrass wherever the sun reaches the caliche, and here and there an old mesquite stands out of the thicket with a trunk as big as your thigh and lichen gray on the limbs. Weathered push piles sit along the openings, dead limbs stacked and left to bleach, and those piles have turned into rabbit and quail country all on their own. That's the sort of detail you notice on the second pass, not the first.

This is South Texas thornscrub, and it has been ranched a very time. Vaqueros were tending stock on Spanish land grants in this county by 1815, two decades before Texas was Texas, and by the 1880 census this county reportedly carried more sheep than any other in America, close to 197,000 head. Land grazed that hard for that many generations grows thicket as readily as it grows grass, and the modern reputation of this country follows from it. Wingshooters and whitetail hunters know the name of this stretch of the state. You are buying into that, not into a lawn.

On the practical end, every tract on this 2,155 acre ranch was surveyed before it was priced, and your way in belongs to you on paper by way of the ranch roads. Those roads are caliche and gravel, crowned and passable in a pickup, curving between the thickets rather than cutting straight across them. There is fence along the southern boundary, better than half that run and a quarter of the perimeter all told, which is worth knowing when you plan a gate or a pen. Where old wire sits and where the recorded survey puts your corner are two separate questions, and the survey is the one that settles it. Restrictions here are light. Ask us how the county currently has the place valued and we will pull that for you before you sign anything.

Owner financing is how most of these move. Five percent gets you started and we carry the paper in house, so you are dealing with the outfit that owns the ranch rather than a bank three states away.

• 27.63 acres, narrow and drawn out, all of it in mesquite and huisache
• Around 43 ft of rise, 654 ft up to 697 ft
• Fence along the southern boundary
• Caliche ranch roads for the way in
• Owner financing from 5%

Best time to see it is January, once the mesquite has dropped its leaves and you can read 40 yards of terrain instead of 10. Bring heavy sleeves and a pair of leather gloves, because the thorn out here finds bare skin every time. We will take you up the ranch road to the top of the rise, let you sit long enough to hear what moves in the thicket, then show you on the survey exactly where your corners fall.