Meansville and Kaleta
Odem, San Patricio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Col. William Marshall Means, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, came to San Patricio County with his family in the 1850s and settled southeast of present Odem. Means was county sheriff from 1862 to 1867. The center of the community was a two-story building erected by the Methodist congregation in 1874. It also served as a schoolhouse, ecumenical church and community center. By January 1876, the community was thriving and headed for a promising future when three of Col. Means' sons went on a shooting spree in Papalote in Bee County. A posse which included San Patricio County Sheriff Ed Garner tracked them to their father's ranch, where Col. Means was killed. In August, Ed Garner was shot as he attended church services. Alley Means was convicted of murder, but later pardoned by Gov. John Ireland. The townspeople lived in fear until the Texas Rangers ordered the Means families to leave the area. By the early 1880s they had sold their San Patricio County holdings. The school building was sold in 1881. Kaleta (5 miles SE) Several families settled in the area that became known as Kaleta in the late 1880s and shortly thereafter built a one-room school. The Kaleta school may have been established to fill a void left by the closing of the Meansville school. Frank S. Rachal served as first postmaster in 1894. The school closed in 1910 and the post office was discontinued in 1914, but the stagecoach line continued to deliver local mail to the home of former postmaster J. D. Willis and his family. By the time of the devastating 1919 storm, the stage line had closed and Kaleta had disappeared from the map. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Col. William Marshall Means, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, settled here in the 1850s and served as county sheriff, and a Methodist-built two-story hall became the heart of Meansville. The community's promise collapsed after 1876, when a shooting spree by the colonel's sons led to a deadly manhunt, the killing of Means and a sheriff, and finally a Texas Ranger order forcing the family out. Nearby Kaleta rose and faded in turn, its school and post office gone and the town wiped from the map by the great storm of 1919.
Why it matters
It preserves the rise and fall of two frontier communities, where violence and disaster could erase a town as surely as they built one.
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Related people
- · William Marshall Means
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
White Point/Rosita
Odem, TX
Long home to Native American peoples and later claimed by 18th-century Spanish explorers, this coastal area near Nueces Bay drew Anglo settlers in the 1830s and, in 1856, the White brothers, who founded a cattle ranch known as White Point. Confederate veteran Darius C. Rachal, hired to drive their herd from East Texas, stayed to build his own ranch and became the community's leading figure after the Whites died in a yellow fever epidemic. When the post office denied the name White Point, it opened in 1892 as Rosita, with Rachal as postmaster; the little community faded after his death in 1918.
Odem First Baptist Church
Odem, TX
On April 28, 1912, the Baptists of Odem organized their own congregation with the help of a traveling missionary, meeting at first once a month in the Methodist church before land was donated for a frame sanctuary. Through donated labor, a Depression-era building, and a World War II that cost the church a member and made materials scarce, the congregation kept building—raising a brick sanctuary in 1951 and education wings in the decades after. Traditions like its harvest-day fundraiser have carried across a full century.
First United Methodist Church of Odem
Odem, TX
The first recorded church services in Odem were held in a private home in 1909, and by 1910–11 the Methodists had organized under visiting pastors and built a small frame church with just nine charter members. As the congregation and town grew together, a parsonage was added in 1922 and a new sanctuary rose in 1949 using lumber salvaged from the old building. Hurricanes battered the church repeatedly, but each time volunteers and insurance rebuilt it.
Bethel Baptist Church of Christ and Cemetery
Odem, TX
Organized in 1873, Bethel Baptist Church of Christ was the first Baptist congregation in San Patricio County, its ten charter members drawn from the scattered pioneer settlements of Sharpsburgh, Moore's Lake, and Meansville. In 1877 the trustees bought this site for a chapel and burial ground, first used that year for an unidentified Mexican girl. Among those laid to rest here are seven Confederate veterans and many early settlers; services ended in 1914 as members moved to the church in nearby Odem.