Dempsey Benton Cain House
Yoakum, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Mississippi-born Dempsey Benton "D.B." Cain (1869-1967) came to Texas circa 1880 and arrived in Yoakum in 1894. He married Emily "Emma" Bostick (1875-1918) of Yoakum, and they had five sons. After Emma's death, D.B. married Yoakum schoolteacher Watsie Lea Nowlin (1888-1972). In 1913, D.B. Cain's $8,000 residence on Grand Avenue, likely designed by local architect J. Henry Yentzen, was completed within walking distance of his downtown store. D.B. Cain & Co. was one of the city's largest mercantile businesses. The Classical Revival house features a hipped roof with dormers, a two-story porch supported by square columns, and Craftsman-influenced green slag glass windows. The Cain family lived in this house until 1976. A devout Baptist, D.B. Cain was named Texas Baptist Father of the Year in 1963 at the age of 94. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2019
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Mississippi-born D. B. Cain came to Texas as a boy and reached the railroad town of Yoakum in 1894, where he built D. B. Cain & Co. into one of the city's largest mercantile houses. In 1913 he crowned his success with an $8,000 Classical Revival home on Grand Avenue, complete with a two-story porch and distinctive green slag-glass windows. A devout Baptist honored as Texas Baptist Father of the Year at ninety-four, Cain saw his family occupy the house until 1976.
Why it matters
The Cain house embodies the prosperity that railroads brought to small Texas towns, where a successful merchant's home became a lasting statement of a community's confidence and growth.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Dempsey Benton Cain
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Yoakum National Bank
Yoakum, TX
When Yoakum incorporated in 1889, its fast-growing commerce needed a bank, and W.O. Richardson gathered fellow town leaders to charter the First National Bank of Yoakum, which opened its doors in July 1890. The bank weathered the punishing Panic of 1893 that sank many small institutions, was renamed the Yoakum National Bank in 1907, and poured capital into local cotton, tomato, and leather industries. Its steadiness underwrote the town's growth for well over a century.
Municipal Power Plant
Yoakum, TX
During the Depression, the small railroad town of Yoakum decided in 1930 — at a packed commission meeting of some 300 residents — to build and own its own electricity rather than buy from an outside utility. The plant that engineers raised in 1932 lit the town until 1938, then served as an auxiliary station and later a city machine shop before local library boosters lovingly converted the sturdy industrial building into a public library in the late 1980s.
Orth-Fitch House
Yoakum, TX
Will Orth, a railroad conductor who also owned a local flour mill, built this handsome home in 1910, and soon other well-off Yoakum families lined Coke Street with houses grand enough to earn it the nickname "Silk Stocking Row." Designed by local architect W. A. Fink, the house blends Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles. Farmer and merchant T. J. Fitch bought it in 1917, and it stayed in his family for more than half a century.
Cotton Industry in Shiner
Shiner, TX
Barbed wire, the railroad, and German and Czech immigrants hungry for small family farms combined to make cotton king in Lavaca County. From August Stephan's first gin in 1892 through the founding of the Shiner Oil Mill in 1896, ginning, cottonseed-oil processing, and rail export drove Shiner's economy for nearly eighty years. The industry peaked in the 1920s with eight gins inside the city limits—four of them on this very site—before the last bale was ginned in 1971.