Cuero

Cuero's second wind came with the Second World War. The Cuero Livestock Commission, set up in 1940, saw sales climb from $251,750 that year to $4.7 million in 1943, and Cuero was the state's largest cattle shipper in 1942 and 1943. Cuero Field, a civilian-run Army Air Forces primary training school at the municipal airport, opened on February 6, 1941. It held 290 cadets at a time and put about $145,000 a month into the local economy before it was deactivated on August 31, 1944. A railroad town had found two new uses for its flat country.

What the plaque says

Cuero Founded 1873 with arrival of Gulf, Western, Texas and Pacific Railroad. County seat moved here from Clinton, 1876. Population grew after coastal storms of 1875 and 1886 destroyed Indianola and refugees from there made a new start here. Home of Turkey Trot, begun in 1912. Farming, ranching, oil and gas center. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 0.9 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.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 25 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.
• De León Plaza — 26 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 26 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.

More markers nearby

• De Witt County Monument — steps away
• Leonard Roy Harmon — 0.2 mi
• Charles Goodwin Breeden — 0.4 mi
• Judge Henry Clay Pleasants — 0.4 mi