Rabb Switch

A wood and water switch was a steam railroad's service stop, and Rabb Switch kept the name after the steam was gone. The Handbook says the land was first granted to John Morris, a Methodist circuit rider, and dates the railroad's Navidad crossing to 1918, on the Texas and New Orleans line; the plaque has it in 1887 on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass. Either way the railroad ceased operations in the 1950s and the school closed in 1953. In the 1980s residents asked the highway department to put the community on maps.

What the plaque says

Rabb Switch Edward M. Rabb (1855-1908) a native of La Grange, Fayette County, Texas, was the son of William and Prudence Smalley Rabb. In the 1880s Dr. Edward M. Rabb settled in this area and purchased 2089 acres of land from S. W. Campbell. At his death, Dr. Rabb left a will with instructions calling for a wood and water switch to serve the railroad to be built on a portion of his land. The San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad was built across the Navidad River in 1887. The switch was constructed and local residents cut and loaded firewood for shipment to Houston. The land that was cleared of firewood was used to farm cotton and corn, the primary source of income for farmers in the area. Two stores opened at Rabb Switch, and a school built in the 1800s was moved to the community in 1919 and served 30-35 students. The railroad ceased operations during the 1950s, at the same time that U. s. Highway 90-A was improved. When the school was closed in 1953, students were transferred five miles west to the Hallettsville Independent School District, and the population declined thereafter as businesses closed. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 6.6 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.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 19 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 19 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.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Vsetin Cemetery — 2.5 mi
• Sublime Baptist Church — 2.7 mi
• Vienna (Cheney Settlement) — 6.2 mi
• General John W. Whitfield — 6.3 mi