Kamey Community
Port Lavaca, Calhoun County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John William McKamey (1878-1955) was born in Salem, Arkansas, to John Samuel Monroe and Sarah Rebecca McKamey. John’s family valued education and moved four times in order for John to graduate from Baylor University with two diplomas in Military Science and Elocution on June 6, 1899. After graduation, john returned to Gregory, Texas, to assist his father in managing the family’s 2,000-acre cotton farm. In 1901, John married Maude Todd whom he met at Baylor. Looking to expand, John and his brother, Tunnell, purchased lots in the Port Lavaca townsite along with the Bay Trading Co. between 1905 and 1907. John also purchased property and established Lynnworth Cemetery (now Port Lavaca Cemetery). During this time, several members of the McKamey family along with J.B. McCampbell purchased more than 8,000 acres that became known as the Kamey Community. In 1912, Maude and John moved from Port Lavaca to the Kamey Community and raised five children. John and the McKamey family raised cattle and farmed cotton and grain sorghum. In addition to the land, a depot along the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio railway provided an accessible transport for McKamey goods to market. In 1910, a post office was established for the family and farm employees but was discontinued in 1915. A one-teacher school was available from 1910 to 1948 as well as a general store for the community, later named the “Kamey Army Store” which operated from 1914 to 2002. Generations of the McKamey family continue to work the land and contribute to the agricultural development of the area. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
John William McKamey, born in Arkansas in 1878, graduated from Baylor University in 1899 and returned to Texas to help run his family's cotton farm. With relatives and a partner he acquired more than 8,000 acres that became the Kamey Community, moving there in 1912 to raise cattle, cotton, and grain sorghum with his wife Maude. A rail depot, a one-teacher school, a post office, and a long-lived general store grew up around the family, whose descendants still work the land.
Why it matters
The Kamey Community traces how a single ambitious farm family could build an entire rural settlement, embodying the agricultural development that shaped 20th-century Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the opening years of the twentieth century, the Texas Gulf Coast plains were being knit into the modern world one rail line and one plowed field at a time. This was the Progressive era, a time of settlement, incorporation, and steady agricultural build-out, when families with ambition and capital could still assemble large tracts of land and shape the map to their own name. Calhoun County, with its cotton, cattle, and grain, was part of that broad expansion.
What made places like this possible was the railroad. A depot along a rail line meant that crops raised far from any city could reach distant markets, and a farm's fortunes rose or fell on its access to the tracks. Around such connections, small rural communities took root — a store, a school, a post office — each one a hub for the scattered families working the surrounding land.
The founding of the Kamey Community sits squarely in that story. It was not born of a gold strike or a government fort but of something quieter and more durable: a family betting on land, patiently accumulating acreage, and building the institutions a settlement needs to endure.
People & events
The community traces to John William McKamey, born in Arkansas in 1878 to a family that prized education so highly it moved four times so he could finish school. That determination carried him to Baylor University, where in 1899 he graduated with two diplomas — in Military Science and Elocution — and, just as consequentially, met Maude Todd, whom he married in 1901.
After graduation John returned to Texas to help his father manage a large family cotton farm, but his ambitions ran toward expansion. Between 1905 and 1907 he and his brother acquired lots in the Port Lavaca townsite and took on the Bay Trading Co., and John also established the cemetery that would later become the Port Lavaca Cemetery. Then, joined by other members of the McKamey family and a partner, the family assembled more than eight thousand acres — the land that would carry a shortened version of their name as the Kamey Community.
In 1912, John and Maude moved from Port Lavaca out to that land and raised five children there. The family ran cattle and farmed cotton and grain sorghum, and a depot on the railway carried their goods to market. Around them grew the ordinary machinery of a settled place: a post office serving the family and its farm employees, a one-teacher school that ran for nearly four decades, and a general store — later known as the Kamey Army Store — that stayed open into the twenty-first century. Generations of the family have continued to work the land since.
Its place in the American story
The Kamey Community is a compact illustration of how much of rural America was actually built — not by grand design from a capital, but by a single striving family accumulating land and then supplying, almost by necessity, the institutions that turn acreage into a community. The school, the post office, the store, the cemetery: each answered a practical need, and together they made a place where people could live rooted lives.
It also shows the tight bond between agriculture and transportation that shaped the whole country in this era. A farm's reach was only as long as its access to the rails, and the depot that carried McKamey cotton and grain to distant buyers was as essential to the settlement's survival as any field or barn. Multiply this pattern across thousands of communities and you have the agricultural backbone of twentieth-century America.
Perhaps most striking is the continuity. Many such family-founded settlements faded once the founding generation passed, their post offices closed and their schools consolidated away. That descendants of the McKamey family continue to work this land is itself part of the American story — the rarer, quieter version in which a founding family's stake actually endures.
If you visit
This is farming and ranching country, and the way to appreciate it is to slow down and read the land itself: fields of cotton and grain sorghum, pastures for cattle, the long flat horizons of the coastal plain. The community grew up around agriculture, and agriculture is still what you'll see.
Let the marker do what it does best — turn an unremarkable rural crossroads into a place with a hundred-year story. As you read about the one-teacher school, the little post office, and the long-lived general store, look around and imagine them as the gathering points they once were, drawing scattered families together for supplies, mail, and lessons.
Kamey makes a natural stop on a drive through Calhoun County, paired with a visit to nearby Port Lavaca, where the same family bought town lots and left its mark. Take the marker as an invitation to notice how many quiet places on the map began exactly like this one — with a family, some land, and the patience to build everything a community needs from scratch.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · John William McKamey
- · Maude Todd
Themes & tags
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