Crystal City Still Posts the Spinach Story. Del Monte Announced a Closing.

The City of Crystal City's own history page says that by the 1930s the town had a reputation as the Spinach Capital of the World. It says the first spinach festival was held in 1936, and that a statue of Popeye was put up the next year across from city hall. It says the festival stopped for World War II and resumed in 1982. On March 26, 2026, the Texas Department of Agriculture's public account posted the same identity: Crystal City, it wrote, is known as the Spinach Capital of the World, and the town has a Popeye statue tied to spinach farming.

The same city history page still says something else. It says the California Packing Corporation, later Del Monte, built a canning plant just northwest of town in 1945, added a can plant in 1958, and expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. Then it says that since that time the company has been the largest single employer in the area. That sentence was still on the city's page when this article was written.

Food Business News reported a different company decision. In a March 4, 2024 article about later plant closures, the paper wrote that in August 2019 Del Monte Foods announced plans to close four plants, and it named Crystal City, Texas, among them, along with plants in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota; Mendota, Illinois; and Cambria, Wisconsin. This article does not describe what is inside the Crystal City building now. The sourced facts are the city's page, the state's 2026 post, and the 2019 announcement as reported in 2024.

Named for a signer, misspelled for decades

The Handbook of Texas says the legislature created Zavala County in 1846, in the disputed country between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, and named it for Lorenzo de Zavala, a Mexican colonist and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The county was organized in 1858. In that act, the handbook says, the legislature spelled the name Zavalla. A 1906 bill to drop the extra L passed the legislature and was rejected by the federal government. The spelling was corrected in 1929.

Crystal City is not the original seat. The handbook says early settlement sat in the east, along the Leona, and that Batesville was the seat. In 1905 E. J. Buckingham and Carl Groos bought the Cross S Ranch, which the handbook puts at 96,101 acres. They surveyed it into farm tracts and a town near the Nueces River, and a farm purchase carried a town lot. The handbook says spinach was introduced in the winter of 1917-18, after Bermuda onions had been the crop the railroad could sell. In 1928 Crystal City won a county-seat election, 978 votes to 446. The handbook records accusations of illegal voting, one indictment, and an acquittal.

The city's history page matches the handbook on the festival and the statue, and it adds the cannery. The handbook is the source for the name, the spelling fight, the ranch purchase, and the 1928 vote. The city page is the source for what Crystal City still tells visitors about itself.

A smaller estimate, and an office that says its job is growth

The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 file puts Zavala County at 9,037 people on July 1, 2025. The same vintage's April 1, 2020 estimates base is 9,677. The estimate is 640 people lower than that base. The handbook's older population paragraphs are not used here as the current count.

No current spinach acreage, and no named grower's own site, was in the city page or the Department of Agriculture post. Those sources keep the spinach name alive. They do not publish a 2026 tonnage. This piece does not supply one.

The current institution the city does publish is the Development Corporation of Crystal City. Its page on the city site gives the office as 101 E. Dimmit Street, Crystal City, and says Type A and Type B boards meet on the first and second Tuesdays. The mission statement says the corporation uses sales tax revenue to stimulate economic growth: assess what the town needs, write a plan, coordinate local efforts, and support work that improves daily life and the return on the tax. The goals on that page are to compete for businesses that create lasting jobs, help existing and new businesses, widen the skills of the labor force, and increase the number and size of small businesses. That is the city's own description of its development office. It is not a list of companies the office has landed.

The city also publishes a restaurant list, with street addresses, including Miguelitos Mexican Grill at 1023 N. 1st Avenue and other local rooms. Those are real businesses on a city page. They are not the spinach industry, and this article does not dress a restaurant row up as a replacement for a cannery.

What changed

The change is the distance between two public sentences. The city history page still describes a 1945 cannery as the largest employer since it opened. Food Business News, writing in 2024 about the company's later closures, states that Crystal City was on the August 2019 closure list. The Texas Department of Agriculture, in March 2026, was still willing to call the town the spinach capital and point at the Popeye statue. The development corporation's page is the present-tense civic answer on the city's own site: a sales-tax corporation whose written job is to grow and keep employment.

A reader who wants a named packer still shipping spinach from Zavala County will not find that company in the sources above. Until a grower or packer can be described from its own site, or from an interview, this piece will not invent one. The spinach story Crystal City tells, the closure announcement a trade paper recorded, the census estimate, and the development corporation's stated mission are the record that is actually on paper.