Beeville on the Poesta

Beeville learned to run itself slowly. Voters incorporated the town in 1890, and a court injunction dissolved it the next year. A second charter came in 1908, commission government in 1912, and a council-manager system in 1951, with Douglas Henslee named the first city manager in 1952. Services followed the railroad: electricity and municipal water in 1903, sewers in 1910, paved streets in 1921. The first school met in a private home in 1860, and a school building went up in 1877. The county seat on the plaque spent most of its first fifty years without a city government.

What the plaque says

Beeville on the Poesta Long before Mexico granted land (1834) on Poesta Creek to the first settlers, Anne Burke and James Heffernan, savage Indians roamed this valley at will. Their colony, although successful at first, soon met disaster. In 1836 James Heffernan, his brother John, and John Ryan, who had planned to join Texas patriots at Goliad, were planting a crop in a field at this site when they were massacred by Comanches. Also killed was James' family, in his picket house upcreek. Bee County was organized in 1858 and named for Col. Barnard E. Bee, a Republic of Texas statesman. Soon after, choice of a county seat came into hot dispute. A site seven miles east, on Medio Creek, was chosen for "Beeville". But ten months later, voters made the 150-acre donation of Anne Burke "O'Carroll permanent county seat, on the banks on the Poesta. The new town, first called "Maryville" for Mary Heffernan (relative of those killed in 1836) was soon renamed Beeville. In its first decade, it had two stores, one saloon, and a blacksmith shop. First courthouse was built for $750 on west side of present square, 1860. First railroad came through, 1866, and a larger courthouse was soon built. After it burned, the present one was erected in 1913. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Corpus Christi State Park — 25 mi
  A lake park in the South Texas brush country above Mathis, on a reservoir of the Nueces, with a Civilian Conservation Corps refectory and more than 200 bird species.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 28 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Presidio La Bahía — 28 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 28 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Barnard Elliott Bee, Sr. — steps away
• Commercial National Bank — steps away
• The Railroad in Bee County — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Beeville — 0.2 mi