Old Sweet Home
Sweet Home, Lavaca County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Sweet Home community was originally settled during the mid-1800s. In 1852, a post office was established with Captain J.A. York as postmaster. York also laid out the town (1860) and partnered with the West family, early area settlers, in business ventures. During the Civil War, the town was used as a winter camp for the Confederacy, and as a camp for freight and cotton wagons which carried supplies from Alleyton (Colorado Co.) to Brownsville (Cameron Co.). A stagecoach provided regular service through Sweet Home, which was on the old Spanish trail between Houston and San Antonio, establishing the settlement as a thriving trading community. Residents also farmed, with cotton and corn becoming staple crops of the area. After the Civil War, Sweet Home became a thriving ranching community. George West, a noted rancher, became known for driving a herd of 14,000 cattle from Lavaca County to an Indian reservation in Montana. He also built a store, hotel and stables. During the late 1860s, Czech and German immigrants began to settle in Sweet Home and by the early 1870s, the two groups had a major presence in the community. In 1887, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad built tracks five miles south of the town. George West and others moved their businesses near the railroad, establishing the current town of Sweet Home. Soon, Old Sweet Home ceased to exist. Today, only a cemetery and a few other vestiges remain of the former settlement. However, Old Sweet Home remains a significant part of Lavaca County history. (2009)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settled in the mid-1800s along the old Spanish trail between Houston and San Antonio, Sweet Home grew into a thriving trading and stagecoach stop after a post office opened in 1852. During the Civil War it sheltered Confederate winter camps and freight wagons hauling supplies toward Brownsville, and afterward it became ranching country, with cattleman George West and an influx of Czech and German immigrants. When the railroad laid tracks five miles south in 1887, businesses relocated and the original townsite faded into a cemetery and a few scattered remnants.
Why it matters
Old Sweet Home is a classic example of how the coming of the railroad could make—or unmake—a Texas town, leaving behind a ghost of the community that once thrived on the wagon road.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · J.A. York
- · George West
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.
Half Moon
Shiner, TX
Named for the crescent shape of its timber, Half Moon on Rocky Creek was a gathering place for Native peoples and travelers long before Spanish explorers noted it in 1689. Settlers arrived from the 1830s to trade and farm, and at its height in the mid-1880s the community boasted stores, a saloon, and a post office. When Henry B. Shiner donated land for a railroad in 1887, the rails bypassed Half Moon, and its people and commerce drained away into the new town of Shiner.
Shiloh Cemetery
Hallettsville, TX
The first settlers of the Shiloh community were English and Scots-Irish families who had moved from South Carolina to Mississippi before pushing on to this timbered, fertile Texas land, naming it for the Mississippi settlement they left behind. They built a church and school and laid out a cemetery beside the local Methodist congregation; when German immigrants arrived in the 1880s, they bought its eastern portion for their own. Its east-facing graves—many carved in German—hold pioneers, teachers, veterans, and five immigrant Lorfing brothers who came from Austria as tradesmen.
Vienna (Cheney Settlement)
Hallesttsville, TX
Vienna traces to the Republic of Texas era, when Maryland native John Cheney settled the west bank of the Navidad River in 1830 on a spread that once topped 7,000 acres. As the Cheneys sold off land, German, Austrian, and Czech immigrants poured in, and an 1873 post office named the place Vienna for the Austrian capital, complete with school, stores, and a cotton gin. A 1940 flood, closing businesses, and a new highway scattered the community, leaving Vienna Baptist Church as its last standing building.