Cuero I Archeological District

Cuero I is named for a reservoir that was only proposed. When the Guadalupe basin was surveyed for it, the findings went into the Texas Historical Commission's Archeological Survey Report No. 12, Archeological Resources of the Proposed Cuero I Reservoir, DeWitt and Gonzales Counties, published in 1974. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 9, 1974, and the listing summary gives its area as about 57,000 acres across parts of both counties. The plaque stands near Hochheim, but the sites themselves lie scattered along the river basin, not at the roadside.

What the plaque says

Cuero I Archeological District Extending 45 miles along the Guadalupe River Basin, Cuero I Archeological District was created to define and preserve cultural resources threatened by a proposed reservoir. Archeological investigation in 1972-73 revealed 352 significant prehistoric and historic sites spanning 9,000 years of human occupancy. The remains include the camps of prehistoric nomads and of historic Indians such as Tonkawas and Comanches. Other sites mark early Anglo-American settlement, which began with the colonizing efforts of Green De Witt in the 1820s and '30s. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 12 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.
• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 14 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 — 17 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.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 23 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.

More markers nearby

• Hochheim (Hoch's Home) — steps away
• Hochheim Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Concrete College — 4.3 mi
• Dr. William Watt White — 5.8 mi