his ranch-house on high ground overlooking the nearby Camino Real del Oeste, a road that linked Buenos Aires with Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. At its side Merlo erected a private oratory, fulfilling the last will of his compadre and it was consecrated to saint Anthony of Padua and the Immaculate Conception. For many years the oratory served as parish church of the huge and almost unpopulated Parish of La Matanza. He also established one of the first schools outside Buenos Aires in where the locals could learn to read and write; the school was entrusted to the mercedarian friars. San Antonio del Camino In 1742, Francisco de Merlo petitioned king Philip V of Spain authorization to found a village on his estates and it was granted in 1755. On August 28, 1755, Francisco de Merlo founds the town of Villa San Antonio del Camino, offering free land to anyone willing to settle in the new town. Villa San Antonio del Camino was named after the before mentioned Portuguese saint and it started with 111 inhabitants grouped in 24 families. Merlo died on April 4, 1758 and the land was divided between his heirs and sold to different private investors. The town remained within the bounds of the estancia donated by Merlo to the Mercedarian Order. In 1776 the mercedarian friars build a hospice in order to take care of the poorer people of the rural area. The town was isolated from the main transportation and communication routes when the nearby road Camino de los Gaona bypassed Merlo three kilometers north after the landlord Juan Marquez built a wooden bridge in his estates over the Reconquista River in 1773. Few years later the parish-seat was moved to the neighboring town of Morón which was already the district seat of the homonymous Partido of Morón, created in 1784. By 1810, Merlo was an insignificant hamlet, forgotten in middle of the Pampas and where the criollos illegally traded with the Indians. The railway In 1857 the Argentine railway company Camino de Hierro de Buenos Aires al Oeste opens the first steam locomotive public railway in Argentina and few years later the company was planning to extend the line westward to Moreno making land speculation a highly profitable activity. In order to reach Merlo the line would pass through the estancia belonged to Manuela Calderón de Pearson and which was