Texas State Highway 4
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| State Highway 4 |
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| Length: | 24.4[1] mi (39.3 km) | ||||||||
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| Formed: | before 1939 | ||||||||
| West end: | Mexican Federal Highway 180 in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico | ||||||||
| Major junctions: |
  US 77/83 in Brownsville
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| East end: | Boca Chica State Park | ||||||||
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State Highway 4 or SH 4 is an east-west state highway that runs from the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville to the Gulf of Mexico at Boca Chica State Park. Outside of Brownsville, it parallels the Rio Grande river. It is the southernmost Texas state highway.
SH 4 was one of the original twenty six state highways proposed in 1917, overlayed on top of the Del Rio - Canadian Highway. From 1919 the routing mostly followed present day U.S. Route 83 from Perryton, Childress, to Aspermont. From here, it followed present day FM 610 and SH 70 to Blackwell. It then continued down U.S. Route 277 into Sweetwater, San Angelo and Sonora. From here, it split into two routes. The western branch terminated in Del Rio and the eastern terminated at Uvalde. The road at this time also had numerous alternate routes simultaneously marked as SH 4, along with occasionally signed SH 4A routes (although most of those routes were given their own numbers by the 1930s).
In 1926, U.S. Route 83 was routed over SH 4 from Oklahoma to Del Rio. The road was then extended to Brownsville, taking over the proposed Del Rio/Laredo segment of the now severely reworked SH 12. The eastern branch from Sonora to Del Rio was then given the designation State Highway 55. Both SH 4 and US 83 were marked concurrently at the time. Unable to create the proposed road, by 1932, a new route was under construction south east from Aspermont, taking SH 4 through Abilene, Junction, Uvalde, Carrizo Springs and finally, Laredo.
By 1939, SH 4 was relocated to its current routing, its eastern terminus now being its western terminus.
