Bellevue-Cheapside

Cheapside has a better-documented beginning than most vanished towns. Thomas Baker, from the Natchez District of Mississippi, built the first permanent cabin in 1857, and Thomas Carter laid out the lots, though a fire destroyed the plat before it was recorded. A local doctor, E. R. Henry, named the place, and the Handbook says he chose Cheapside, Virginia, not the London street. The first post office opened on June 5, 1882, in DeWitt County and moved a mile west into Gonzales County about 1890. The last store and post office closed in February 1989.

What the plaque says

Bellevue-Cheapside Pioneer area settlers, many of English descent, acquired land at this site in 1876 for the establishment of a community church, school, and burial ground. A 2-story Woodmen of the World Lodge was also located nearby. Still used, Bellevue Cemetery has served residents of the Cheapside community (1.5 miles north). Named for a well-known street in London, Cheapside was once the site of a cotton gin, grist mill, hotel, grocery stores, saloons, and a variety of other businesses. Despite the town's later decline, influences of the pioneer English settlers are still evident. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 13 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 18 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 19 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• Palmetto State Park — 26 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.

More markers nearby

• Westhoff — 5.5 mi
• Concrete College — 6.8 mi
• Dr. William Watt White — 6.9 mi
• Pilgrim Presbyterian Church — 7.1 mi