Co-Founders of Yorktown: John York_Charles Eckhardt

Yorktown's later chapters belong to the railroad. The town was chartered on August 2, 1854, with a school the year before and a first church in 1857. It incorporated and got its post office in 1871, the year of the Charles Eckhardt store that stands today; Eckhardt and Sons had been trading since 1850. In 1886 the Aransas Pass Railway was built about a mile south, the town drifted toward it, and the old site became Upper Yorktown. The restored 1871 store opened as a museum in 1985 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

What the plaque says

Co-Founders of Yorktown: John York_Charles Eckhardt John York (1800 - 1848) -- Charles Eckhardt (1813 - 1852) Soldiers and builders of Texas. York, born in Kentucky, came to Texas in 1821; was a captain in siege which expelled Mexican Army from Bexar, 1835. Gave site for Yorktown, 1847. Died in an Indian fight won by his men. Eckhardt came from Germany. Fought in war for Independence and Mexican War. His mercantile and freighting interests led to founding of Yorktown on trail he had surveyed from Indianola to New Braunfels. He built the first house in Yorktown, 1848. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 15 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 — 24 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.
• Panna Maria — 24 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.
• Presidio La Bahía — 24 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.

More markers nearby

• De Witt County — 0.6 mi
• Shiloh — 3.7 mi
• Lithuanians in Texas — 3.7 mi
• Jubilee Park Pavilion — 7.7 mi