Cabeza

Cabeza's first economy was sheep. Three sheepmen, P. P. Short, John Riley and Joshua Butler, founded the place about 1876, and Short gave the land for the school where Robert E. Magee taught the first session in 1888. Baptists and Methodists met in the same building from about 1890. In 1948 about 150 pupils attended two schools here, one for White children and one for Hispanic children, and both were discontinued in the 1950s. A gin handled around 1,000 bales a year until the boll weevil ruined the business, and the post office ran from 1899 to 1907.

What the plaque says

Cabeza In the 1870s Joshua Butler from Virginia settled here on 2000 acres along Cabeza Creek. Soon John Riley and P. P. Short began large sheep and cattle ranches. Their children attended schools in Yorktown and Helena until a schoolhouse was built on Short's land. Later a public school opened here and served for Baptist and Methodist worship. A post office was begun in 1889. The village had a doctor's office, mercantile stores, cotton gin, and blacksmith shop. The post office closed in 1907. By the 1950s area schools consolidated and small farms replaced the large ranches. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panna Maria — 14 mi
  The Silesian village on a plateau above the San Antonio River that claims the oldest permanent Polish settlement in America, with a church of 1878 and a ceiling found again in 2000.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 24 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.
• Goliad State Park and Historic Site — 28 mi
  Mission Espíritu Santo on the San Antonio River, a mission ranch whose herds seeded Texas cattle country, rebuilt from ruin by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 29 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.

More markers nearby

• Nordheim Shooting Club — 4.7 mi
• Jubilee Park Pavilion — 5.0 mi
• Pilot Knob — 5.6 mi
• Runge, Texas — 6.6 mi