Historical Marker

Petersburg

Hallettsville, Lavaca County · Texas

Erected 1936

Petersburg was a county seat that never grew. Arthur Sherill gave 300 acres in 1846, beside the Zumwalt Settlement of the early 1830s and on the roads from San Felipe to San Antonio and from Victoria to Columbus. Twenty people lived here in 1848. One building served as courthouse, church, school and sheriff's office until it burned; afterward county business moved among buildings or under trees, and prisoners were kept in barns. A house of courthouse post oak lumber stood here in 1963. The land is private, with no public access.

What the plaque says

Petersburg County seat Lavaca County, 1846-1852. Founded upon the town site donated by Arthur Sherill. Named by order of the Commissioners Court August 31, 1846. First officers, 1846-1848, Andrew Ponton, chief justice; B. Stribling, probate judge; M. H. Hinch, sheriff; Josiah Dowling, county clerk; D. Laughlin, district clerk; Gabriel Zumwalt, tax assessor and collector; Phillip Howard, treasurer. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Where it stands

29.39038, -96.91352 · Directions

Worth the stop nearby

Lavaca County Courthouse — 4.2 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.
Spoetzl Brewery — 16 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.
St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 21 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) — 23 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.

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