Hochheim Cemetery

The town these graves belong to lived on the road. Hochheim sat on the stage route to Indianola and Austin, and by 1885 it shipped cotton, wool and hides, with about 200 residents, ten businesses and a steam gristmill. Cuero, fifteen miles south, had the nearest railhead and bank until 1892, when Yoakum, eight miles east, offered both. A post office opened in 1870. In 1895 half the population was German, and the count stood at 261 in 1904, then about 100 from the 1920s into the 1950s. The town shrank as the railroads took its trade elsewhere.

What the plaque says

Hochheim Cemetery Land for the Hochheim Cemetery was donated by Rachel S. Crawford (1806-1879). She and her husband, James (1800-1861), were pioneer settlers in the Hochheim community. They and many of their descendants are buried here. The graveyard contains many unmarked sites where pioneer immigrants who entered Texas through the nearby port of Indianola were interred. Also buried here are veterans of the Civil War, Spanish American War, and World Wars I and II. In use for more than 100 years, the Hochheim Cemetery is an important element in the community's heritage. (1983)

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 — 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.
• 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

• Cuero I Archeological District — 0.3 mi
• Hochheim (Hoch's Home) — 0.3 mi
• Concrete College — 4.6 mi
• Dr. William Watt White — 6.1 mi