May-Hickey House
Yoakum, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
One of the most important early vernacular dwellings remaining in southeast Texas, this structure was built in the 1840s for the family of John Joseph May. The James Hickey family lived in the house as early as 1861 and later acquired the land and house. This finely built one-and-one-half-story home, made of hewn logs with chinking and covered with milled siding, features the distinctive open dogtrot and stone chimneys popular in early Texas. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1988
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This sturdy dogtrot house of hewn logs and stone chimneys went up in the 1840s, the frontier years when Texas was passing from republic to statehood. Built for the family of John Joseph May and later home to the Hickeys, its open central passage was a hallmark of early Texas building, designed to catch the breeze in a hot climate.
Why it matters
Vernacular homes like this preserve the everyday craft and architecture of Texas's first settlers, who built with the timber and stone at hand.
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Related people
- · John Joseph May
- · James Hickey
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery
Yoakum, TX
Catholic families settling the rural Brushy community along Brushy and Supple Jack creeks organized a congregation around 1847 and raised a log sanctuary, then built the permanent St. Joseph parish—known to settlers as Brushy Church—by 1876. Though the church burned in 1932, its cemetery, begun with an 1871 burial, endured. Its ranchers, farmers, sharecroppers, and Civil War veterans, along with mausoleums and religious statuary, reflect the deeply Catholic rural world that once surrounded Yoakum.
Yoakum
Yoakum, TX
Yoakum rose on land granted by Mexico in 1835 to settler John May, in country used to gather cattle bound up the Chisholm Trail. The arrival of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad in 1887 turned it into a transportation hub, and the town — named for rail official B. F. Yoakum — incorporated in 1889 around industries in beef, leather, and canning.
The Trail Drivers of Southwest Texas
Yoakum, TX
This memorial honors the cowboys who drove great herds of longhorns out of Southwest Texas between 1867 and 1887, the heyday of the long cattle drives north to railheads and open ranges. Yoakum sat squarely along the routes these trail drivers followed.
Pilot Grove Church and Cemetery
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Named for a landmark stand of trees, Pilot Grove drew settlers like John Wesley Vick, who arrived about 1875 and donated an acre for a free community burial ground. The first recorded adult burial came in 1880, and in 1889 the Vicks deeded adjoining land to the newly organized Mt. Herman Baptist Church, which built its frame sanctuary in 1891. As membership dwindled after 1948, descendants of the early families kept the church and cemetery alive, forming an association to care for them.