Webberville

The 1846 post office was named Webber's Prairie, but the place was sometimes called Smithwick's, for Noah Smithwick, its first postmaster. Webber's wife was Silvia Hector Webber. By the mid-1880s Webberville had steam gristmills and cotton gins, two churches, a school, four general stores and 200 residents, shipping cotton and livestock; by 1900 it counted 382 people. After the post office closed in 1903, mail came through Manor. The schools were consolidated with the Hornsby-Dunlap common school district in 1951, and the population stood at about fifty from the 1940s through 2000.

What the plaque says

Webberville This community was named for John F. Webber (1793-1882) who received a land grant in 1827 and settled in this area with his African American wife and children. A post office was established in 1846 for Webber's Prairie, and by 1853 the name was changed to Webberville. Based on a cotton farming economy, the town later included grist mills, cotton mills, general stores, schools, churches, and a cemetery. The post office was discontinued in 1903. A ferry crossing on the Colorado River ceased operation in the 1920s. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McKinney Falls State Park — 13 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 13 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 13 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 13 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• Webberville Ebenezer Baptist Church — steps away
• Site of the Home of Col. Robert M. Coleman — 2.9 mi
• Decker United Methodist Church and Community — 8.4 mi
• Clayton Vocational Institute — 8.5 mi