Barker Post Office

The post office the plaque follows served a town that turned from rail stop to office park. Early Barker had an inn, a brick factory, a twine mill, a store, a telephone company, a depot, two churches, a one-room school and a saloon. Its population held at 100 from 1925 to 1949, then fell to fifty. In 1974 Park Ten opened a business park north of the Katy tracks, the last dairy became a subdivision in 1982, and by the 1990s Trendmaker had two office towers where rice once grew. Barker counted 2,500 people in 2000.

What the plaque says

Barker Post Office The settlement that became Barker developed on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad in the late 1890s. G. T. Miller applied for a post office in 1898. It occupied a corner of his store, which also was used as a saloon. The structure was damaged in the 1900 storm, and postmaster Miller moved it to the east side of the Barker-Clodine Road and rebuilt it. He remained postmaster until 1911. Moved to a new location on the Katy Freeway (Interstate Highway 10) in 1967, it was designated a third-class post office in 1969 and a second-class office in 1977. In 1978 the postal service considered closing it, but residents rallied and saved it. Designated first class in 1981, the post office moved to baker road in 1984. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Menil Collection — 18 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 — 19 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 19 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 20 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

• _H7 Ranch — 1.1 mi
• Bear Creek Methodist Church and Cemetery — 4.0 mi
• Gray Lodge No. 329, A. F. & A. M. — 4.5 mi
• First Baptist Church of Katy — 7.1 mi