Post Oak Island Lodge #181, A.F. & A.M.

Beaukiss, where the lodge settled in 1901, was founded in 1880 by Samuel M. Slaughter, who was also its first postmaster, according to the Handbook of Texas. By 1884 it had a church, a school, a gristmill, a cotton gin and seventy-five people. Early in the twentieth century it also had several doctors, three fraternal organizations and a string band. An oil well at the nearby Abbott field briefly revived the town in the 1930s. The school closed in 1947, and by 1949 only twenty people lived there.

What the plaque says

Post Oak Island Lodge #181, A.F. & A.M. Settled as early as the 1840s, Post Oak Island was one of this area's earliest communities. There, on September 15, 1855, I.J. Kidd, T. Gatlin, P.A. Middleton, M. Gardner and A.S. Harper established a Masonic lodge. On February 2, 1856, the lodge was officially constituted as Post Oak Island Lodge #181, and by October 1860, lodge members had paid the mortgage on their lodge hall. They moved the hall in 1878 to Sam Smith Springs (Lawhon Springs), and in 1901, they moved it again, to Beaukiss. Despite the relatively small population of Beaukiss, the long-standing institution has maintained a high membership, pulled from the area's dispersed rural communities. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 23 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• The Round Rock — 27 mi
  A table-shaped stone in Brushy Creek gave Round Rock its name in 1854; the Chisholm Trail crossed the creek near it, and Old Town stayed behind when the railroad pulled the town east.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 27 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• Inner Space Cavern — 29 mi
  A Georgetown cave found in 1963 when highway engineers drilled test holes, holding Pleistocene fossils and 72-degree rooms that visitors reach by an artificial tunnel.

More markers nearby

• Pioneer Publisher and Printer David Ervin Lawhon — 1.6 mi
• Type Cemetery — 5.2 mi
• Mager Cemetery — 5.5 mi
• Pleasant Grove Cemetery — 6.0 mi