San Patricio de Hibernia, laid out in 1831 on the east bank of the Nueces River, functioned as the headquarters and administrative center of the empresario colony led by John McMullen and James McGloin, who had contracted with the Mexican government to settle two hundred Irish Catholic families in the region beginning in 1828-1829, part of a broader wave of Irish colonization along the lower Texas coast that also included the neighboring Power and Hewetson grant centered at Refugio. Colonists sailed from New York and Ireland, weathered shipwreck, disease, and disorientation en route, and eventually settled the lower Nueces valley, where the townsite grew up at the crossing of the Camino Real and the Atascosito Road, giving it strategic importance as a travel and trade junction. As the colony's seat, San Patricio housed an elected alcalde and aldermen, land commissioners who issued settler titles, and the everyday civic functions of a frontier municipality, while the surrounding families worked the land as farmers and ranchers. Early homes were simple picket structures with thatched roofs, reflecting the settlement's frontier character. By the mid-1830s the town had grown to several hundred residents. Today San Patricio survives as a small rural community in San Patricio County, its founding and function as an Irish colonial administrative seat marked by Texas historical markers distinct from those commemorating the 1836 Battle of San Patricio.