Almeda

The Handbook adds the name and the numbers to the plaque's farm town. Almeda was named for Almeda King, daughter of Dr. Willis King, who promoted the townsite. It stood on the International-Great Northern tracks eleven miles south of Houston with a post office from 1893 to 1959. Its count ran from 50 people in 1893 to 200 in 1914, 80 in 1925 and 1,200 by 1962, and businesses grew from four in the 1930s to forty by the 1960s. As late as 1960 residents had no public water or fire department; sewers came in 1963.

What the plaque says

Almeda In 1892 Illinois investors bought land here, near a pre-Civil War railroad line, and platted the town of Almeda. With its mild climate, the town was marketed as a citrus farming community, but unusually severe freezes caused many farmers to turn to dairy production by the 1920s. Almeda became a prosperous dairy farming town. In 1893 residents founded a school district that served children from parts of three counties. Although Almeda became part of the city of Houston in 1959, it remains a part of local history. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 8.1 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• The Menil Collection — 8.8 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Rothko Chapel — 8.8 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 9.1 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Edward R. and Ann Taylor — 3.3 mi
• Temple Lodge No. 4, A. F. & A. M. — 4.1 mi
• Missouri City — 6.3 mi
• Teas Nursery Company — 6.5 mi