Bay City Post Office

Bay City did not exist when it won the county seat. On September 18, 1894, voters in a county of about 3,000, roughly three in four of them Black, moved the seat from Matagorda to a townsite after promoters promised a courthouse. The Bay City Town Company, formed by the Colorado mining millionaire David Swickheimer with G. M. Magill, N. M. Vogelsang and Nicholas King, bought 320 acres from D. P. Moore and 320 from the Mensing brothers of Galveston. Its first courthouse was a small frame house moved from Matagorda.

What the plaque says

Bay City Post Office An election in the fall of 1894 resulted in the relocation of the Matagorda county seat from the city of Matagorda to Bay Prairie (now Bay City). D. P. Moore, the postmaster at the nearby small town of Elliott, owned property in the new town and moved his dry goods store to Bay City in 1894. His nephew, Joseph D. Moore, became Bay City's first postmaster. In 1912 D. P. Moore sold his property to the United States government for a new post office building. Contractor W. B. Lovell broke ground for the post office in 1917 and the building opened to the public on May 15, 1918. An addition built in 1958 provided extra working space and a loading dock at the rear of the structure. This building continued to serve the Bay City community as a post office until 1989. During that time it also served as a town meeting place, the site of the Selective Service Board during World War II, a Civil Defense fallout shelter, and a place of refuge from storms and hurricanes. On October 30, 1990, after several months of negotiations with the United States Postal Service, the Matagorda County Museum Association purchased the building to house the Matagorda County Museum. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 20 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 24 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.

More markers nearby

• Ira Ingram, First Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives — steps away
• Matagorda County — steps away
• Matagorda, C.S.A. — steps away
• St. Mark's Episcopal Church — steps away