Amphion and Amphion Cemetery

Amphion once trained teachers. Before 1900 the town had a Masonic lodge and a summer normal school, and its post office ran from 1881 to 1916. By 1887 it had a general store and two cotton gins, and by 1896 about 100 people, a hotel, a church and a school. In 1904 the school enrolled 72 pupils with two teachers. The Artesian Belt Railroad bypassed the town for Jourdanton in 1909, and by 1956 Amphion was called a ghost town. The Handbook of Texas says the origin of the name is not known.

What the plaque says

Amphion and Amphion Cemetery Amphion traces its beginning to the establishment of Atascosa County's first courthouse which is believed to have been constructed near this site at the county seat of Navatasco in 1857. Amphion, thought to have been named after a figure in Greek mythology, was located within the 17,000-acre ranch of Jose Antonio Navarro, a prominent local rancher and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Amphion was at one time a thriving community with several general stores, a hotel, post office, blacksmith shop, cotton gin, tannery, churches, fraternal lodges and a school. Amphion Cemetery was established about 1870 at this site on land donated by Roy Jenkins and Frank Lozano. Although the earliest recorded gravesite is that of Laura Underwood (d.1891) there is a gravestone with the year 1800 inscribed on its surface that local tradition claims marks the grave of a young boy killed by indians. This cemetery contains the graves of at least two veterans of the American Civil War. When railroad lines were built through Atascosa County in 1907 and 1927 along routes that bypassed Amphion, business activity declined and the community eventually dissolved. Virtually all that remains of the former town of Amphion is this cemetery. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atascosa County Courthouse — 7.6 mi
  The only surviving Mission Revival courthouse in Texas, built in 1912-13 on Jourdanton's town circle after a county seat vote that some residents still call a theft.
• Longhorn Museum — 10 mi
  Atascosa County in one roadside museum: longhorn-and-mustang ranching, a moved railroad depot and caboose, a horse-drawn hearse and the town that calls itself the birthplace of the cowboy.
• Mission Espada and the Espada Aqueduct — 25 mi
  The southernmost San Antonio mission and the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States, still carrying river water over Sixmile Creek to the fields after nearly three centuries.
• Mission San Juan — 25 mi
  The mission near the river bend where the San Antonio got its name in 1691, with an unfinished church foundation and farm fields still watered by an eighteenth-century acequia.

More markers nearby

• Poteet — 4.2 mi
• Rossville — 6.7 mi
• Edward Brown — 7.4 mi
• Rossville Cemetery — 7.5 mi