Site of Old Town: Lodi

Lodi went on trading long after it lost the county seat. The San Antonio and La Bahía road still ran through, and James Gray opened a blacksmith shop and bar there in 1873. Charles Fischer built a cotton gin in 1886, and in 1887 Benito López started a store and a school. The San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad came through in the mid-1880s, with a depot reported at Lodi, but Floresville's growth pulled the trade away. A concrete bridge replaced an iron one where FM 536 crosses the river in 1957.

What the plaque says

Site of Old Town: Lodi Community in an area known by 1720 as land of the Cayopines, a Coahuiltecan Indian tribe. The site was important to Spanish missions of San Antonio, since here along the river their herds were pastured. For the herdsmen, adobe huts were built. After the Apache Indians began to raid the area in 1731, the herdsmen took refuge across the river within the stronger walls of the Mission Cabras. The Pena brothers had Rancho San Eldifonzo Del Chayopin here from 1756 to 1787, and a nephew applied for title when mission lands were secularized in 1794. However, award was made to Simon and Juan Arocha. Their neighbors (descended from Canary Island colonists of 1731) included Jose Maria Flores and Erasmus Seguin. Stephen T. Cook settled here in 1858, putting in a store and securing office of postmaster. He may have named Lodi for a town in Mississippi, his old home state. Wilson County was organized in an election held Feb. 13, 1860. Samuel W. Barker (husband of local aristocrat Josefa Flores) became the first sheriff of the new county. Improved roads were built here. After the Civil War, Wilson County voters on Dec. 8, 1867, designated Lodi county seat--an honor lost to Floresville in 1872. Area then reverted to ranching. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panna Maria — 20 mi
  The Silesian village on a plateau above the San Antonio River that claims the oldest permanent Polish settlement in America, with a church of 1878 and a ceiling found again in 2000.
• Longhorn Museum — 21 mi
  Atascosa County in one roadside museum: longhorn-and-mustang ranching, a moved railroad depot and caboose, a horse-drawn hearse and the town that calls itself the birthplace of the cowboy.
• Mission Espada and the Espada Aqueduct — 21 mi
  The southernmost San Antonio mission and the oldest Spanish aqueduct in the United States, still carrying river water over Sixmile Creek to the fields after nearly three centuries.
• Mission San Juan — 22 mi
  The mission near the river bend where the San Antonio got its name in 1691, with an unfinished church foundation and farm fields still watered by an eighteenth-century acequia.

More markers nearby

• Captain Will Wright — 0.5 mi
• The Flores de Abrego Family and Floresville — 0.5 mi
• Wilson County — 0.5 mi
• James Charles Wilson — 0.5 mi