Town of Pettus

The plaque tells of railroads, a presidential stop and an oil well; the Handbook counts the town itself. In 1914 Pettus had 250 people, five general stores, Baptist and Christian churches, a cotton gin, a blacksmith, a lumberyard and a physician. After the 1929 oil discovery, the numbers stayed modest: 300 residents and eighteen businesses in 1933, and an estimated 400 residents and thirteen businesses in 1990. Pettus sits where U.S. 181 meets Farm Road 623, about fourteen miles north of Beeville.

What the plaque says

Town of Pettus Oil capital of Bee County, Pettus was settled in the 1850's when John Freeman Pettus set up his sprawling ranch about 4 miles south of here. The son of one of Stephen F. Austin's first 300 colonists, Pettus was an extensive cattle and horse breeder. The town, previously called "Dry Medio" for a nearby creek, was named for him during the Civil War. The community was in the vicinity of two important Indian skirmishes in Bee County in 1859 and the 1870's; but the town slept until 1886, when the tracks of the San Antionio & Aransas Pass railroad reached this site. It then awoke to become the cattle shipping center for the area. In the same year, John S. Hodges, a pioneer citizen, laid out the townsite and donated land to be used for streets and S.A. & A.P. right-of-way. For years the railroad stockyards and depot were places of bustling activity as freight trains came for loading and wood-burning steam engines took on water. In 1909 the presidential train of Wm. H. Taft stopped at the Pettus water tank. The tank--a final monument to steam railroading here--was razed, 1965. In 1929 the Houston Oil Co. brought in its well "No. 1-Maggie Ray McKinney" and from that time Pettus has played a continuing useful role in Texas economy. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Panna Maria — 22 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.
• Goliad State Park and Historic Site — 26 mi
  Mission Espíritu Santo on the San Antonio River, a mission ranch whose herds seeded Texas cattle country, rebuilt from ruin by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
• Zaragoza Birthplace State Historic Site — 26 mi
  A rebuilt stone house beside La Bahía marking where Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza, the general of the Battle of Puebla and Cinco de Mayo, was born in 1829.
• Presidio La Bahía — 26 mi
  A Spanish fort on its third site since 1749, held in turn by filibusters, insurgents and Fannin's Fort Defiance, rebuilt in stone in the 1960s around a chapel that never fell.

More markers nearby

• Tuleta — 5.3 mi
• Normanna — 8.8 mi
• Benjamin Dudley Tarlton Dougherty — 8.9 mi
• Gentry Dugat — 11 mi