Old Sweet Home

Old Sweet Home sat on a freight road. The Handbook says George West opened a store, hotel and stables there in 1860. In the Civil War the town was a winter camp for wagon trains hauling cotton and supplies from Alleyton to Brownsville, the only Confederate port left open for much of the war. Texas cotton then was grown largely by enslaved people. Czechs and Germans arrived about 1873. When the railroad passed five miles south in 1887, West sold his buildings to Jan Matusek and moved his store, and by 1890 the new town had six stores.

What the plaque says

Old Sweet Home The Sweet Home community was originally settled during the mid-1800s. In 1852, a post office was established with Captain J.A. York as postmaster. York also laid out the town (1860) and partnered with the West family, early area settlers, in business ventures. During the Civil War, the town was used as a winter camp for the Confederacy, and as a camp for freight and cotton wagons which carried supplies from Alleyton (Colorado Co.) to Brownsville (Cameron Co.). A stagecoach provided regular service through Sweet Home, which was on the old Spanish trail between Houston and San Antonio, establishing the settlement as a thriving trading community. Residents also farmed, with cotton and corn becoming staple crops of the area. After the Civil War, Sweet Home became a thriving ranching community. George West, a noted rancher, became known for driving a herd of 14,000 cattle from Lavaca County to an Indian reservation in Montana. He also built a store, hotel and stables. During the late 1860s, Czech and German immigrants began to settle in Sweet Home and by the early 1870s, the two groups had a major presence in the community. In 1887, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad built tracks five miles south of the town. George West and others moved their businesses near the railroad, establishing the current town of Sweet Home. Soon, Old Sweet Home ceased to exist. Today, only a cemetery and a few other vestiges remain of the former settlement. However, Old Sweet Home remains a significant part of Lavaca County history. (2009)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 6.8 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.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 8.3 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.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 19 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 24 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• West-Wagner Homestead — 0.3 mi
• Vysehrad School — 4.1 mi
• St. Mary's Parish — 5.7 mi
• Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbens Stinnett Howard — 5.9 mi