Stratton

Stratton stayed small. The Handbook of Texas estimates twenty people there in 1896, and twenty-five were reported for decades after 1933. William W. McKissack opened a store in 1890 and the post office moved into it from a private home. The Stratton school ran from 1891 to 1951, and until Pilgrim Rest Church was built in 1912 the Baptists held services in the schoolhouse. At its peak, the Handbook says, Stratton had a drugstore, a gin, a gristmill and two blacksmiths. The original store closed in 1943.

What the plaque says

Stratton The pioneer community of Stratton, which developed as the center of a large agricultural area, was established here before the Civil War. It was named for John Stratton, a Cuero saddler who had land interests in the vicinity. The settlement had a post office from 1887 to 1905, a general store, school, cotton gin, drugstore and blacksmith shops. The Primitive Baptist Church, organized in 1883 at Burnt Camp in Lavaca County, moved here in 1914. Pioneer area settlers and two veterans of the Civil War are buried in the community's Alexander Cemetery. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chisholm Trail Heritage Museum — 9.5 mi
  A cattle-country museum in Cuero's 1903 Knights of Pythias Hall, telling the Guadalupe Valley's 1866 drive north and the Sutton-Taylor feud that bloodied DeWitt County.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 20 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 — 24 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.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 25 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.

More markers nearby

• Terryville — 5.1 mi
• Hebron Community — 6.4 mi
• Site of Friar-Cardwell Stage Stand — 7.8 mi
• Old Chisholm Trail — 7.8 mi