Shiner

The railroad town began as New Half Moon and took the name Shiner only in 1888. The older Half Moon had been a post office at a trading post, opened in 1885 near the present site. Henry B. Shiner gave 250 acres for right-of-way and depot, and the town incorporated in 1890 with L. P. Amsler as its first mayor. Methodists had already organized in Amsler's office in 1887. The Gazette began in 1892, and Czech and German immigrants soon became the dominant groups, with the Sokol and the Slavonic Benevolent Order among their organizations.

What the plaque says

Shiner Originated as German-Czech community of Half Moon, located west of present town. When the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad came through in 1887, citizens moved to rail line, where H. B. Shiner, Victoria landowner, had given a townsite. Shiner was developed by cattlemen. Industries include brewery, wire works. City has museum. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 0.4 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 — 14 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.
• 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.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 18 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

• First National Bank of Shiner — steps away
• Captain Charles Welhausen — steps away
• Kaspar Wire Works — 0.7 mi
• Saint Ludmila's Academy — 0.8 mi