After retiring from the newspaper he founded (the Corpus Christi Caller) in 1912, Eli Merriman assumed a role as the city's #1 promoter. Big changes were on the horizon for the sleepy little village of Corpus Christi, and Eli Merriman would be at the forefront of those changes.
In 1913, the city elected the 29-year-old Roy Miller as its mayor. Miller wasted no time in modernizing the city. Miles of city streets would be paved, an efficient water and sewage system would be built, and the nasty-looking Bluff would become the city's showcase feature.
Merriman had always recognized the potential of Corpus Christi as a major tourist site. As a director of the Corpus Christi Commercial Club (forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce), he urged the publication of ads promoting the city as a tourist destination in newspapers and magazines all around the country. With war raging in Europe (1914-1918), he knew that wealthy Americans would need a new place to vacation. What better place than Corpus Christi, he reasoned.
The war in Europe also prompted Merriman to add his plea...along with others... to the War Department to consider Corpus Christi as the ideal site for a new army training base. Those pleas were answered with the establishment of Camp Scurry in Corpus Christi in 1916. It only lasted until 1919, but it helped to establish the fact that Corpus Christi was an ideal location for a military base.
It was Merriman's voice that was the loudest in calling for Corpus Christi to do all that it could to attract industry to the city. Without that, he reasoned, Corpus would remain a small fishing village like so many others on the Texas coast.
In a 1915 editorial, Merriman wrote:
“Cheap water and clear water and with natural gas close at hand, a movement, well organized, should be started here for getting factories. In the town of Houston, not much larger than Corpus Christi, there are factories on every hand, one employing twelve hundred persons. Factories mean payrolls, and we should work to get them. With a good number of factories Corpus Christi with the natural advantage she already has would soon become a much larger and more productive city.”
It was Eli Merriman who argued constantly for a deep water channel across the bay and into the city from the Gulf. He had personally known and worked with Elihu Ropes in the early 1890s and had been one of Ropes' most vocal supporters for his deep water channel. Merriman was on hand for the Port of Corpus Christi opening in 1926. His greatest dream for the city had finally come true. After the port opened, Merriman took up the cause of protecting the city and its new port from future hurricanes. Merriman had lost his house (which had stood on Water at Schatzell) and most of his property in the 1919 hurricane and he urged city leaders to consider constructing a seawall similar to that which Galveston had built. In a 1927 letter to the editor, Merriman declared that Corpus Christi would never achieve its goal of becoming a major tourist spot until its bayfront was made safe and beautiful. It's fitting that Eli Merriman lived to see this dream become reality as well (he died in the year following the completion of the seawall and T-heads).
In the years following his retirement from the newspaper, Merriman wrote an extensive history of the city. He had personally known most of the city's earliest citizens and recounted his own knowledge of their contributions to the city's growth. Many of those early pioneers (including Merriman's own parents) were buried in the city's first, and oldest cemetery.....Old Bayview. First established in 1845, by 1900, the cemetery grounds were a wreck. A group of ladies formed the Bayview Cemetery Association to clean up, look after, and care for the cemetery. In 1912, at the ladies' request, Merriman took over the task. Merriman secured money to hire a caretaker, buy lawn equipment, erect a fence, plant grass and trees, and add piping for water. He began to write articles for the Caller about the many prominent citizens buried there in hopes that the people of Corpus Christi would take an interest in preserving this historic place. Merriman's plea was nothing new. Forty years earlier, in 1882, he had co-signed a letter to the Mayor making the same argument for preservation. If nothing else, Eli T. Merriman was persistent! But, his efforts paid off. In 1925, the deed to the cemetery was transferred to the City of Corpus Christi, and its maintenance was assigned to the Parks Department. In 2023, Old Bayview Cemetery was named to the list of sites on the National Register of Historic Places.
In May of 1940, Eli T. Merriman was honored on his 88th birthday by the Fraternal Order of the Knights of Pythias, of which he had been a member for 50 years. A grateful city of Corpus Christi paid homage to his countless contributions to the city's growth and prosperity. When Merriman passed away on January 25, 1941 the city had lost its most beloved citizen and its most vocal supporter. He was buried in Old Bayview Cemetery beside his wife, Ellen, who had died in 1934.....and next to the graves of his parents, Dr. and Mrs. E. T. Merriman.
