The site at Refugio functioned as the administrative headquarters of the Power and Hewetson colony, an empresario grant that brought Irish Catholic immigrant families to the Texas coastal plain beginning in 1834. Colonists settled around the secularized buildings of the former Spanish mission, Nuestra Senora del Refugio, repurposing mission structures and surrounding lands as the organizing point for issuing land titles, coordinating settlement, and supporting the colony's farming and ranching economy. As colony headquarters, Refugio served everyday civic functions: it was where empresarios James Power and James Hewetson processed settler claims, where families gathered for supplies and community life, and where the colony's Catholic identity was maintained in continuity with the mission's earlier religious role. The settlement anchored Irish immigrant households who took up stock-raising and farming on the surrounding grant lands, forming one of the few sustained Irish colonization efforts in Mexican Texas alongside the nearby San Patricio colony. Today the historic colony site underlies the modern town of Refugio, the Refugio County seat, where no mission-era structures survive intact but where historical markers commemorate the Irish colonization effort and the mission's location. The site functions today primarily as a heritage and commemorative landmark rather than an active settlement remnant, with local markers, cemetery burials of early Irish colonists, and county historical materials preserving the memory of the colony's founding role in South Texas immigration history.